Your Company’s New Year Resolution: Cutting Carbon, Naturally
Highlighting the potential of nature-based carbon removal and why your company should consider incorporating it into its sustainability strategies for the upcoming year.
Company News
Dec 20, 2023
Siya Kulkarni
According to the SBTi Net-Zero Standard, “After a company has achieved its long-term target and cut emissions by more than 90%, it must use permanent carbon removal and storage to counterbalance the final 10% or more of residual emissions that cannot be eliminated.” While emphasising the importance of prioritising emission reductions throughout their value chain, actively removing emissions in the near term is equally crucial. The IPCC report issued in the first quarter of this year warned us of a more than 50% chance of imminent global temperature rise. However, it also offered hope by indicating that there are still solutions available to prevent it. Nature-based carbon removal is one of the most important solutions to achieve this.
What is nature-based carbon removal?
Nature-based carbon removal involves using natural solutions, such as extending, restoring, or managing ecosystems, to extract carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. This approach provides advantages that go beyond carbon removal and climate resilience, offering benefits to ecosystems, communities, and biodiversity.
Nature-based solutions (NbS) play a vital role in mitigating climate change, potentially contributing around a third of the emissions reductions necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030.
Some nature-based solutions (NbS) include:
- Afforestation and reforestation: planting trees to restore forests and expand tree cover in non-forested areas or previously forested zones.
- Soil carbon sequestration: using various agricultural techniques and practices to enhance soil’s capacity to absorb carbon.
- Biochar: heating biomass without oxygen to convert its carbon into a type of charcoal that resists decay, serving as a soil additive.
- Coastal wetland restoration: reviving mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses, known as natural carbon sinks.
At Treeconomy, we're actively engaged in solutions such as afforestation, improved forest management, and biodiversity-focused projects like rewilding.
Using Nature-Based Carbon Removal in Your Sustainability Strategies
When it comes to businesses, incorporating nature-based solutions (NbS) into long and short-term environmental strategies can provide tremendous upsides.
Some of the main advantages include:
Cost-Effectiveness
Nature-based solutions like afforestation offer the lowest-cost, high-quality carbon removal compared to highly engineered solutions. This entails investing in projects that eliminate carbon while providing numerous benefits for the environment, livelihoods, and biodiversity, all at reasonable costs.
And it doesn’t stop there. Investing in nature restoration also saves costs by addressing business vulnerabilities to climate change in the long term, making it a win-win situation.
Increase Company’s Reputation
Nature-based solutions (NbS) not only offer cost-saving- opportunities and disaster management. By investing in solutions that actively remove carbon while enhancing livelihoods and biodiversity, companies can boost their reputation. This signals to the market and investors their commitment to effecting positive climate impacts.
Impact Beyond Climate-Mitigation
Nature-based solutions are powerful tools to achieve significant co-benefits alongside climate change mitigation. Some of these co-benefits include:
- Sustainable livelihood opportunities: From employment opportunities during the project implementation and management phase to carbon revenue benefit-sharing agreements with the local community to additional revenue stacking opportunities - nature-based carbon removal projects ensure that communities are an integral part of the project’s fabric.
- Resilient societies: Building the resilience of natural resources against adverse climate change impact - and - and in turn, build community resilience as well, as they create protective buffers against wildfires, flooding, disease, and other ecological disasters.
- Biodiversity enhancement: NbS when implemented effectively can facilitate an increase in biodiversity of a given area by enhancing the supportive environments required for biodiverse ecosystems to thrive.
Rome wasn’t built in a day
Nature-based carbon removal has admittedly faced many setbacks this year, particularly within the voluntary carbon markets space. Rising cases of fraudulent carbon accounting methods, abuse of local communities in jurisdictions where carbon projects are developed, and debates around what makes a carbon credit additional - that is, whether the sequestration would have happened without the presence of a carbon project.
Some of the main challenges with nature-based solutions include:
Difficulty in Measuring & Reporting
Measuring the impact of nature-based solutions is challenging and still requires extensive regulation and rigorous standardisation. Technology can assist in alleviating this issue.
The advancements in satellite and digital monitoring present the perfect opportunity to assess the effectiveness of nature-based solutions in generating positive climate impact.
At Treeconomy we use remote sensing technology to quantify carbon stocks across nature-based projects regularly - while conventional measurement approaches are time and labour-intensive, remote sensing can help project developers estimate carbon stocks in a matter of minutes. This allows for more frequent monitoring that can increase the transparency and integrity of data collected and disseminated to investors, carbon credit buyers, and project developers.
Choosing the Right Option
The absence of accurate or readily accessible data for assessing and directly comparing nature-based projects makes it challenging to confidently decide where to invest. From ensuring project validity, and being able to determine its impact with tangible metrics, to addressing community and ecosystem benefits beyond carbon, evaluating the variables with an assurance of trust is key.
This is where partnering with companies like ours becomes beneficial. We collaborate with experienced in-country development partners who have deep connections with the communities they work with. Ensuring active participation and involvement, guaranteeing optimal carbon removal and co-benefits from our projects. Moreover, we provide access to a single platform (our marketplace) that allows you, as a carbon buyer, to conduct all your due diligence efficiently.
Permanence of NbS
The permanence of nature-based solutions varies among different types of projects. It relates to how long carbon can be stored and the risk of its release back into the atmosphere. Nature-based solutions face potential risks, both environmental and human-induced, which might affect their permanence.
This comes down to project design and a thorough assessment of local risks and dynamics. Alignment with supportive local government regulations can ring-fence these projects from potential risks of cancellation or reversal. Community participation and explicit benefits also serve as a way to safeguard carbon projects and ensure high project management standards. Monitoring plays a very important role here too - ensuring these projects have long-term, lasting impact means regular monitoring as well as the use of historic satellite imagery and data to assess changes in carbon stock over time, and identify impacts and exposure to physical risks such as wildfire, flooding, and disease.
Before it’s too late
Nature and biodiversity loss are taking place at an alarming rate - global wildlife populations have dropped by 69% since 1970, with species disappearing at a rate of between 10 and 1,000 times the average rate of extinction. These figures point to a sixth mass extinction - and further losses in nature and biodiversity can result in tipping points that could lead to an irreversible imbalance in climatic conditions.
The time to act is now
While nature-based solutions are not perfect, corporates must embrace these solutions today as a part of their long-term commitment to saving the planet and adapting to climate change impacts. While reducing carbon emissions is vital, removing today’s carbon dioxide from the atmosphere plays an important role in climate change mitigation. Using nature as a tool to do so also helps buoy communities and businesses against serious harm.
How are you going to incorporate nature into your climate goals in 2024?
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Are you interested in learning more about how you can incorporate NBS into your company’s sustainability strategy? Reach out to us at hello@treeconomy.co.
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