Category Archives: Nature-based Solutions

Fossil Fools Day, 2023

On this first day of April we celebrate foolishness. There is none greater than burning your own home because you like the pretty flames. It’s not even as clever as peeing in your pants to keep warm at the start of winter, as they say in the Nordic countries. So we throw more coal, peat, forests, petroleum and natural gas on the fire because it’s convenient right now. But the effects, as Al Gore and Greta Thunberg have pointed out, will be not just inconvenient but deadly.

Too many fires are making too much carbon dioxide too quickly. This traps the sun’s heat on Earth, warming the oceans and melting the ice of the poles. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land. In its bed are a trillion tonnes of frozen methane, which is already bubbling to the surface, and methane is much better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Moreover, in the frozen lands around about are another trillion tonnes of methane, held in frozen peat and organic soils. This is already leaking out as the ice lands melt and rot.

So what will happen when global heating pushes the Arctic beyond whatever tipping point keeps it in the deep freeze? Of course the answer is an immense pulse of methane. That’s the big show that could finish us off. Carbon dioxide is only the warm-up act. And when might that happen? All the signs suggest around the middle of this century. Are we ready for this, and do we even know what ‘being ready’ means? Are we even trying seriously to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions? We still churn out scores of billions of tonnes of the stuff every year, and save only a thousandth part of that. So the answers are: not yet!.

We seem inclined to keep putting things off. But with a mid-century deadline looming from the Arctic methane if nothing else, putting things off is really daft. Even if the sums are wrong and it’s really the 2080s rather than the 2050s when the Arctic methane hits the fan, that’s still not very long. We need to get a grip. And that means putting away the jester’s bladder and getting serious. So what to do instead of acting the Fossil Fool?

I could rattle off a list, but here are a couple. First, we should vote only for leaders who will tax carbon emissions radically and enable ferocious and fair investment in decarbonising our economies. And second, we should make sure that rewards from investment are highest when emissions are avoided soonest. With special merit points for those that also help protect and restore nature, and that promote human wellbeing and community solidarity. This would make working with local communities to prevent harm to all our remaining high carbon-density natural ecosystems the maximum top priority everywhere on Earth.

The simple fact in this emergency is that a tonne of emissions avoided now has much more survival value than a tonne of emissions avoided years from now. So that should be the starting point of all our policies, and it should shape all our efforts, incentives and disincentives. Any proposal to decarbonise anything should be met by the question: how much carbon saved how quickly? And be closely followed by another: and with what co-benefits?

These questions will lead not only to the best nature-based and community-based solutions, but to the best technological ones as well. The point is that every potential investment should be made to answer the same questions, so we can compare them. Talking up innovative and imaginative solutions is OK, but only if they are supported by evidence-based reasoning that lets us pick the most cost-effective ways to avoid global catastrophe. Survival value, precaution and co-benefits should be the watchwords. The time is over for Fossil Fool governments that fail to protect us, our children and the biosphere. No to more foolishness! Happy All-Fools Day.

New paper on biosphere tipping points and climate investment

My new paper ‘Implications of Earth system tipping pathways for climate change mitigation investment’ has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal Discover Sustainability. It can be freely downloaded here. In it, I explore some implications of an anticipated biosphere-wide tipping point (BTP) in the year 2050 ± 10, including:

that all climate change mitigation investments should be designed, chosen and judged against this hard and dated deadline, thus urgently prioritising early delivery of net GHG savings;
that deadline-compliant investments should aim transparently for optimum cost-effectiveness in their biophysical outcomes, especially net GHG emission savings but also biodiversity, ecosystem service and climate change adaptation co-benefits; and
that investors and markets should prefer actions that yield highly cost-effective biophysical returns, especially where valuable co-benefits are expected.

I explain how to do the necessary calculations, and I provide examples from recent mitigation aid portfolios to support a change of focus from financial to biophysical returns on investment. From these cases, key ways to prevent the BTP include protecting and restoring high carbon-density natural ecosystems, and improving choice awareness and building capacity to promote decarbonisation in all economic sectors.

Three urgent research priorities remain: (1) on the consequences of an Arctic Ocean imminently free of summer sea ice, and options for remedial action including the recapture of methane at large scale and high speed; (2) on testing a new dated mitigation value metric in justifying precautionary mitigation investments in multiple sectors and contexts; and (3) on integrating diverse co-benefit values (biodiversity, ecosystem services, adaptation, etc.) into mitigation investment decision making.

Swiss climate aid evaluation published

The Independent Evaluation of SDC’s Engagement in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation, 2015-2020 has just been published by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). It was led by Julian Caldecott, with Warren Olding as senior expert and inputs by Tino Smaïl, Mariam Hamad, Daniel DiMarzo and Julia Schwarz of Particip GmbH, as well as by national consultants Dominica Chingarande (Zimbabwe), Lidija Fajdiga (North Macedonia and Kosovo), Pankaj Kumar (India), Marina Marill (Perú) and Mario Zenteno (Bolivia). The evaluation ranged across SDC’s whole climate portfolio, and took a system-level view on major patterns, lessons and opportunities. It was based on: (i) a Portfolio Study to describe key patterns in SDC climate change expenditure; (ii) a Design and Performance Study to assess design quality, performance (effectiveness, impact and sustainability) and transformative potential among a sample of 31 climate change projects; and (iii) a Capacity and Partnership Study to examine the strengths and weaknesses of SDC’s key delivery mechanisms.

Considering the rapid pace of global environmental change, the SDC Senior Management Team noted that: “The evaluation is an important piece of evidence that SDC has developed a portfolio of projects that benefit both people and the planet. The evaluators highlighted in particular the suitability of initiatives building on locally adapted and owned solutions for sustainable development challenges (what the evaluators refer to as ‘nature and community based solutions’ approach). This approach is not only considered to be highly effective, but also has a significant transformative potential. The SDC’s senior management is committed to build on this strength and continue the investment in projects that apply a nature- and community-based solution approach, alongside the continuation of selected regional and global endeavours. The significance of potential of co-benefits is considered as an important insight that proves that investment decisions between poverty reduction and climate change adaptation/mitigation should not be seen as a zero-sum game.”