What are natural climate solutions?
Addressing global climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our times. Natural Climate Solutions (NCS), sometimes referred to under the broader umbrella of nature-based solutions, focus on how to protect, restore, or manage lands in ways that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (Griscom et al 2017). If carried out fully, such actions could contribute to more than 1/3 of climate mitigation goals and as such are actions at the forefront of the agenda for many organizations.
When implemented, NCS can also produce a wide range of co-benefits that contribute to human well-being (HWB), biodiversity, or general environmental conditions. The primary goal of this project is to better understand which HWB co-benefits might be expected with a given NCS action. We categorize NCS actions or 'pathways' following Griscom et al (2017), and use categories of HWB presented in McKinnon et al (2018). This gives us a matrix of NCS pathways vs HWB co-benefits that we can begin to document and investigate.
What are we doing?
We're interesting in better understanding how NCS pathways impact aspects of human well-being, biodiversity, and the environment
This project has two core components:
- An evidence map: We are developing a comprehensive review of the academic evidence on co-benefits associated with NCS pathways. Using machine learning techniques and natural language processing, we are extracting all the relevant articles we can find from Web of Science & the Scopus databases to map the existing evidence based across all 20 pathways and 11 co-benefits.
- Expert elicitation: Through an online interactive survey of NCS co-benefits we will verify the evidence base collected above, review and refine our findings with experts and authors, and gather perspectives on which NCS are likely to generate the most social benefit. The expert survey will be available soon.
Why is this project important?
Currently we know little about the co-benefits of NCS, yet these are crucial (and indeed sometimes more important) to decision-makers who will choose and implement NCS. This deficit of evidence hinders decision-making and policy action for where and how to implement NCS, who will likely benefit (or lose), and how. Our focus on the dominant NCS pathways and 11 possible human, biodiversity, and environmental co-benefits will develop evidence for policy action.
Learn more about the core collaboration team.
For more information on this project contact Brian E. Robinson, the principal investigator at McGill University.