Could nature itself hold the solution to climate change?

A 2019 claim that natural forest restoration is the best climate solution nearly ended a research effort. A colleague warned that prioritizing restoration could anger people who view emissions cuts as the most urgent need. Restoration can contribute about 30% of carbon drawdown, but rising temperatures still require emissions reductions. The claim focused on the best overall option for improving livelihoods and wellbeing, not only maximum carbon impact. Many proposed solutions involve painful trade-offs, including stratospheric aerosol injection, which could alter sunlight and rainfall and harm crop growth, and direct air carbon capture, which faces high financial and energy costs. Restoring natural habitats can avoid trade-offs by using ecological networks that support life and resilience.

"In 2019, my scientific research was nearly brought to an early end when my team and I published the bombastic statement that natural forest restoration was the best climate change solution available in a paper for the peer-reviewed journal Science. I remember a colleague from the World Wildlife Fund advising me that this message represented career suicide. He argued that people would be furious because reducing greenhouse gas emissions was the most urgent priority. The revival of nature might help with 30% of our carbon drawdown needs, but you cannot stop rising temperatures without cutting emissions. I agreed both then and now."

"However, I explained that when we referred to the best solution, we didn't simply mean the one with the largest impact in terms of C02; we meant the best option for improving the livelihoods and wellbeing of people, too. And that, as we shall see, plays a crucial role in magnifying the beneficial effect. Many people believe the scale of the climate challenge calls for immense technological innovation, geoengineering, or the transformation of our economy. But with these solutions there are often painful trade-offs."

"Almost every technological or geoengineering fix you can imagine comes at the expense of something else. Stratospheric aerosol injection is one example. Creating clouds of reflective particles could block the sun and cool the land below. But alterations in sunlight and rainfall patterns could disrupt the growth of the crops we depend on for food. Similarly, direct air carbon capture has incredible potential to remove C02, but the huge financial and energy costs currently stand in the way of deploying it at the scale we need."

"There is one set of solutions, however, that present no trade-off at all when they are done right. The restoration of natural habitats like forests is an exception in our climate toolkit because it draws on the same network of connections that allowed life to flourish in the first place. The resilience of the n"

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