NbS play a vitally important role in helping to mitigate climate change this century, but their contribution is relatively small compared to what can be achieved by the rapid phase-out of fossil fuel use. Furthermore, unless we drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, global heating will adversely affect the carbon balance of many ecosystems, turning them from net sinks to net sources of GHGs.

All ecosystem types hold opportunities for NbS to enhance provision of ecosystem services to people. Management at the landscape scale, accounting for and utilizing interactions between ecosystems, can maximize long term benefits. It is especially urgent to prevent inappropriate tree planting on naturally open ecosystems such as grasslands, savannahs and peatlands, or in areas with native forests. NbS must be valued in terms of the multiple benefits to people, rather than overly simplistic metrics such as numbers of trees planted.

NbS are explicitly designed to provide a range of benefits to local people, including supporting livelihoods, improving health, and reducing vulnerability to climate change. They are designed to take the needs of different sectors of society into account, especially those of marginalized groups such as women, and benefits are assessed through monitoring and improved through adaptive management.

Biodiversity underpins the societal benefits derived from NbS by boosting the delivery of many ecosystem services in the short term, reducing trade-offs among services (e.g. between carbon storage and water supply), and supporting the health and resilience of ecosystems, thus increasing their capacity to deliver benefits in the long term. To sustain ecosystem health, other location-specific ecological aspects must also be considered, such as ecosystem connectivity. Therefore, successful, sustainable NbS are explicitly designed to provide measurable benefits for biodiversity and ecosystem health, and these benefits are ensured through monitoring and adaptive management.