Every now and again, a sector-specific term will make the crossover from the vocabulary of its native circles to that of the broader public. From the climate change sphere, it was “ecosystem services” that began to cross the bridge a few years ago. Now, it’s “nature-based solutions.”
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has set the prevailing definition for the term as “actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits.”
Max Scher, the head of clean energy and carbon programs for cloud-based tech behemoth Salesforce, puts it in more basic terms: “For us, I think it’s about using nature to improve the state of the world.”
The scope of nature-based solutions – which also go under the acronym of NBS – accordingly run the gamut of the innumerable combinations of ecosystems and landscapes paired with any of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. “An NBS can be anything from restoring a wetland to bring down drinking water purification costs for a city to planting mangroves to protect against storm surge,” says Tim Christophersen, head of the nature for climate branch of UN Environment (UNEP). “It can be a solution for a climate challenge or a solution for another societal challenge.”
According to the UN, nature-based solutions can provide more than a third of the climate change mitigation needed to reach goals to curb global warming by 2030. Restoring 350 million hectares of land by the same time could generate up to USD 9 trillion in net benefits.
The Decade will accelerate existing global restoration goals, for example the Bonn Challenge, which aims to restore 350 million hectares of degraded ecosystems by 2030 - an area almost the size of India. Currently, 57 countries, subnational governments and private organizations have committed to bring over 170 million hectares under restoration. This endeavour builds on regional efforts such as the Initiative 20x20 in Latin America that aims to restore 20 million hectares of degraded land by 2020, and the AFR100 African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative that aims to bring 100 million hectares of degraded land under restoration by 2030. read further from the source above