← Wiki

Concept

Nature-based solutions

Also known as: NBS, Natural climate solutions

Interventions that protect, manage, or restore ecosystems to address societal challenges — including climate mitigation, climate adaptation, biodiversity loss, water management, food security, disaster risk. Working with ecological function rather than replacing it with engineered systems. The IUCN formalized the term in 2016; subsequent UN, IPCC, and academic work has organized the framework. Examples include forest protection and restoration, regenerative agriculture, wetland and mangrove restoration, urban green infrastructure, watershed management, beaver-dam analogs. Estimates suggest nature-based solutions could provide ~30% of climate-mitigation needs by 2050 alongside other benefits.

Categories

Climate mitigation NBS:

  • Forest protection — preventing deforestation; the highest per-acre carbon-impact NBS
  • Reforestation and afforestation — particularly on degraded land
  • [[regenerative-agriculture|Regenerative agriculture]] — soil-building practices; [[cover-cropping|cover cropping]], no-till, livestock integration
  • Agroforestry — integration of trees into agricultural systems
  • Wetland restoration — particularly mangroves, salt marshes, peatlands
  • Grassland and savanna management — holistic-grazed grasslands; fire-managed savannas

Climate adaptation NBS:

  • Coastal protection — restored mangroves, oyster reefs, dune systems
  • Urban green infrastructure — green roofs, urban forests, bioswales
  • [[watershed-management|Watershed management]] — natural flood storage, riparian buffers
  • Drought resilience — agroforestry, soil-building, traditional agriculture

Biodiversity NBS:

  • Protected areas and Indigenous-led conservation
  • Habitat connectivity — corridors, stepping stones
  • Species reintroduction — keystone-species recovery (beaver, wolf, oyster)
  • Invasive species management

IUCN definition

The IUCN’s 2016 definition: “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.”

Eight criteria help distinguish NBS from greenwashing:

  1. Effectively address societal challenges
  2. Use ecosystem function as part of design
  3. Result in net biodiversity gain
  4. Be economically viable
  5. Be inclusive, transparent, and empowering
  6. Equitably balance trade-offs
  7. Adaptive management
  8. Mainstream and sustainable scaling

Climate mitigation potential

Multiple analyses (Griscom et al. 2017, others) estimate NBS could provide ~30% of climate mitigation needed for 2°C / 1.5°C targets, with major contributions from:

  • Forest protection (largest single category)
  • [[reforestation|Forest restoration]]
  • Improved agriculture (cropland and grazing land)
  • Wetland and peatland restoration
  • Coastal-blue-carbon protection

Critiques and limits

NBS are not silver bullets:

  • Cannot replace fossil-fuel-emission reductions — NBS can supplement, not substitute
  • Permanence concerns — forest fires, droughts, land-use changes can release sequestered carbon
  • Land-use trade-offs — afforestation competes with food production, biodiversity, Indigenous sovereignty
  • Indigenous-rights questions — many NBS proposed on Indigenous lands without consent or benefit-sharing
  • Quality varies — large NBS programs have documented mixed performance
  • Carbon-credit fraud — NBS-based carbon credits have substantial documented quality problems

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Shares approach with: [[carbon-sequestration]] · [[ecological-succession]]
  • Supersets: [[blue-carbon]]

Sources

  • IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions (2020)
  • Griscom et al. (2017) “Natural Climate Solutions,” PNAS
  • Drawdown, Paul Hawken ed.
  • IPCC AR6 Working Group III

Rooted in life.

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Scientific

subset of

  • Blue carbon blue-carbon protection and restoration is among the most-effective per-acre nature-based climate solutions

shares approach with

  • Drawdown Drawdown's analysis includes substantial nature-based solutions among the most-effective interventions

2 inbound links · 2 outbound