Strategies for Climate Change Mitigation Using Nature

🌥️ The Disappearance of Bright Clouds: Earth’s Reflective Shield 🌍✨ Bright, low-lying clouds are among Earth’s most powerful climate regulators 🌤️. As a reflective shield, they bounce sunlight back into space ☀️, cooling our planet and stabilizing the climate. These clouds are disappearing, driving global temperatures higher 🌡️ and intensifying extreme weather 🌪️. Bright low lying clouds are seeded with aerosols produced by LIFE and rely on vibrant ecosystems both on land 🌳 and in the oceans 🌊. We must restore the balance 🌿. 🌳 Stop Treating Farmland as Part-Time Deserts Bare, uncovered soil is a climate hazard. It reflects sunlight back into the atmosphere and suppresses rainfall 🌵. We need to design farm systems that keep the ground covered year-round with vegetation 🌾, through methods like cover cropping, no-till farming, and integrating livestock grazing 🐄. Healthy soils produce better crops while emitting the biogenic aerosols that seed reflective clouds. 🌱☁️ ☀️ Stop Clearing Land for Solar Clearing vegetation to install solar panels sounds green but can turn fertile land into barren “solar deserts” 🏜️. Vegetation removal disrupts the water cycle 💧, reduces bioaerosols, and suppresses cloud formation. Sustainable energy systems must coexist with nature 🌳💡, preserving vegetation to protect cloud-seeding cycles. 🌊 Save the Whales, Save the Clouds Whales 🐋 play a vital role in ocean health, fertilizing phytoplankton 🦠 that release cloud-forming compounds like dimethyl sulfide (DMS). Protecting whales ensures the survival of these ocean gardeners 🌊. Restoring marine ecosystems, and preventing overfishing 🎣 are crucial for sustaining the bright clouds that cool the planet. 🌫️ 🌾 Agroforestry: A Natural Climate Solution Integrating trees, shrubs, and crops into agricultural landscapes boosts biodiversity 🐝, enhances water retention 💦, and nurtures soil health 🌱. Agroforestry systems produce the cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs) and ice-nucleating particles (INPs) that sustain reflective clouds. 🌤️ 🌳 Silvopasture combines grazing with tree cover, providing shade and soil protection. 🌾 Alley cropping integrates trees with crops for windbreaks and erosion control. 🌬️ Shelterbelts and riparian buffers protect waterways while supporting cloud-friendly aerosols. 🌱 Green the Deserts With water retention landscapes 💧 and vegetation planting 🌿, we can transform dry, lifeless areas into thriving ecosystems. The Great Green Wall of Africa 🌵🌳 shows how restoring vegetation can stabilize climates and increase rainfall. 🌟 Restoring Bright Clouds: Bright clouds are disappearing faster than we can imagine, and their loss accelerates climate chaos 🔥. We have the tools to reverse this trend—restoring ecosystems, protecting marine life, and implementing sustainable farming practices 🐄🌾. 💚 Let’s create a thriving, resilient planet where life flourishes. 💚 EcoRestoration Alliance AgReserves, Inc. Soil4Climate Inc.

Want a lot of carbon removal...right now? Take another look at young secondary forests. These new forests are often undervalued and cut down. But our new research - out today in Nature Climate Change - shows that you can get the greatest carbon removals per hectare of investment from ~20- to 40-year-old. These forests can remove up to 8 times more carbon than new regrowth, making them a vital part of our climate strategies. If we want to maximize carbon removal now to stave off the worst of climate change, we must protect secondary forests. Read the blog: https://lnkd.in/eJtJQnpt Explore the science: https://lnkd.in/e5cMjd8e This was a large international effort, led by Nathaniel Robinson, with Ronnie Drever, David Gibbs, Kristine Lister, Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert, Viola Heinrich, Philippe Ciais, Celso H. L. Silva-Junior, Zhihua Liu, Tom Pugh, Sassan Saatchi, Yidi Xu (and me!) The Nature Conservancy, Nature United, World Resources Institute, Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment, University of Birmingham, GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, IPAM Amazonia - Amazon Environmental Research Institute, CTrees, Lund University

There is incredible news today from the The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), which has approved three REDD+ methodologies for Core Carbon Principle (CCP) labels. This means that credits produced under these labels meet the ICVCM’s 10 criteria for quality. This is a huge win for nature-based solutions and for the climate overall. Nature-based interventions could provide 20% of needed mitigation through 2035 per UNEP, but to date we’ve struggled to finance these projects at the pace or scale required. Now businesses can invest in REDD+ with increased confidence, and I expect a flood of carbon finance which will not only produce critical mitigation, but also provide much needed funding for rural landowners and indigenous communities, as well as protect biodiversity. This is also a win for the friendly skeptics of the carbon market generally and REDD+ specifically, who have courageously flagged quality issues with legacy REDD+ projects over the past few years. It’s a win for those standards that heard the criticism and worked hard to improve. And it’s even a win for legacy REDD+ methodologies which blazed the trail and gave us the data we needed to learn and iterate. This is how different sectors come together to improve the impacts of carbon finance over time. And make no mistake, we have to keep learning, keep analyzing, keep making constructive critiques, and keep improving. As we deploy projects based on these methodologies we will find ways to make them better. And the same is true of other nature- based project types like ARR and IFM. When you buy a nature-based credit you are buying critical impacts but also you are joining a community of continuous improvement. Today’s decision is a sign that nature absolutely CAN and MUST be relied upon in our struggle to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. It is a signal to all parties - buyers, investors, NGO stakeholders, governments, and communities, that it is time to scale these solutions with the urgency the climate crisis requires!