Guidelines for sustainable, successful nature-based solutions

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In order to meet these guidelines, policymakers across the public and private sectors need to set goals and quantitative targets relating to each guideline.

We led the development of four guidelines for successful, sustainable NbS in February 2020 by a consortium of 20 UK-based organisations, as a letter to the then incoming President of CoP26, Alok Sharma, to encourage adoption of the guidelines by other Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In May 2020, the guidelines were adopted by the Together With Nature campaign, a call to corporate leaders to commit to four principles for investing in nature-based solutions.

For a detailed explanation of why these guidelines are needed, with full references, see the open-access peer-reviewed article “Getting the message right on nature-based solutions for climate change”.

In order to meet these guidelines, policymakers across the public and private sectors need to set goals and quantitative targets relating to each guideline, and practitioners should monitor progress towards these targets using robust holistic metrics (i.e. those that take carbon, biodiversity and social equity into account), and use adaptive management to improve outcomes. As public and policy interest in NbS grows rapidly, we are promoting these guidelines to encourage their broad adoption by businesses and governments. The goal is to ensure investment in NbS is channelled to the best biodiversity-based and community-led NbS and does not distract from or delay urgent action to decarbonise the economy. If you would like to sign, please get in touch.

Publications

Seddon, N., Smith, A., Smith, P., Key, I., Chausson, A., Girardin, C., House, J., Srivastava, S. and Turner, B. (2021), Getting the message right on nature-based solutions to climate change. Glob. Change Biol., 27: 1518-1546.

Funders

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