NbS in the News

Many companies, governments, cities, regions and financial institutions are making net-zero commitments. To achieve this, in most cases, carbon offsetting is necessary. This comes with risks, such as inappropriate carbon accounting, the release of stored carbon at a later date, and negative impacts on people, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Published today, the Oxford Offsetting [...] Read more Tweet September 29, 2020

Today sees the launch of the Leaders Pledge for Nature. Endorsed by political leaders from 70 nations (and counting) across five continents, including from five of the world’s biggest economies, the pledge calls for a global scale-up of ambition to protect biodiversity to help avert the planetary emergency we face. Signatories recognise that biodiversity [...] Read more Tweet September 28, 2020

Climate Week NYC is taking place from 21st to 27th September; it’s the biggest climate summit of the year and will focus on how we can address climate change as we recover from COVID-19.

Alok Sharma, COP26 President, has made the following announcements to kickstart the week:

Race to Zero is a global campaign for a zero-carbon [...] Read more Tweet September 21, 2020

WWF’s 2020 Living Planet Report publishes updated figures for the Living Planet Index (LPI): the size of around 21,000 mammal, bird, fish, amphibian and reptile populations fell by an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. The change in LPI varies regionally, with the most striking result being a 94% decline in tropical subregions of [...] Read more Tweet September 17, 2020

Today our systematic review on nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation has been published in Global Change Biology. It is the first global systematic review of the effectiveness of nature-based solutions and provides evidence that nature-based solutions play a key role in addressing the impacts of climate change, but also highlights potential trade-offs to [...] Read more Tweet September 10, 2020

The UK-based multinational bank, HSBC, is collaborating with a climate change advisory firm to create a venture which will target investments at projects which protect or enhance nature whilst generating profit. Some of these projects will likely qualify as nature-based solutions, such as sustainable forestry and regenerative agriculture. The venture is expecting to raise up [...] Read more Tweet September 4, 2020

Over 20 cities, companies and nonprofits in the US have pledged to collectively plant more than 800 million trees by 2030. This is the first chapter of the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees programme to be officially launched.

Groups taking part in the new national programme will need to outline detailed plans for how they [...] Read more Tweet September 4, 2020

The UK government has proposed a new law which will force companies above a certain size to ensure that the products they sell have deforestation-free supply chains.

Currently, most environmental targets and regulations are restricted to UK territory alone. For example, the net-zero emissions by 2050 target does not include emissions released abroad during the production [...] Read more Tweet August 26, 2020

This article explains how the Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna, has been neglected in part due to being overshadowed by its charismatic neighbour – the Amazon rainforset. In fact, the Cerrado is invaluable:

Its deep soil holds water from the wet season, feeding into eight watersheds which together provide 40% of Brazil’s freshwater It is a [...] Read more Tweet August 26, 2020

Brewdog has announced that from the 22 August 2020 they will remove twice as much carbon from the air each year than they emit. Currently, the only method for removing carbon from the air at scale is using natural ecosystems. Let’s take a look at what this company is doing:

Calculating scope 1, 2 and 3 [...] Read more Tweet August 26, 2020