“Nature-based solutions” and the biodiversity and climate crises

“Nature-based solutions” (NbS) is a contested term. Academics write long peer-reviewed articles laying out criteria by which so-called NbS might be evaluated, whilst oil majors create new “nature-based solutions” business units unaligned with the basic elements of the definitional criteria being set out by the academics. At the end of the day, NbS means what the powerful actors using it to green their images want it to mean.

The phrase “nature-based solutions” says everything and nothing at the same time. Its proponents argue that such a broadly encompassing term provides opportunities to highlight a whole range of beneficial, biodiversity-protecting practices at the same time, and that packaging all these together in this term might help mobilize protection from a range of drivers of biodiversity and ecosystem loss by calling attention to the myriad ways that societies benefit from “nature.” 

But the opportunities provided by the catchall term must be weighed against the risks and dangers of catching too much, providing a convenient cloak for practices that destroy biodiversity. One of the most dramatic examples might be the oil company proclaiming to be saving nature while using the green image to hide continued exploration, extraction, and burning of fossil fuels, an example that is at the same time illustrative and illuminating of how actors make a term mean what they need it to mean. While academics and advocates have devoted large amounts of human and financial resources to developing standards and guidelines and frameworks putting boundaries around NbS, none of those are adequate to protect nature from the fossil fuel and other extractive industries seeking convenient public relations cover for their devastating operations. Indeed, the term “nature-based solutions”, for the biodiversity-destroying industries, is an enormous public relations gift. The fossil majors liberally wrapping themselves in NbS demonstrate its PR value.

Greenwashing may be the first and most visible of the dangers posed by the term; the full range of threats is broader and deeper. “Nature-based solutions”may be used to justify dispossession through landgrabbing and “fortress conservation”. Land-based carbon offsets, biodiversity offsets, and “fortress conservation”-style “protected areas” are all NbS strategies of corporations and other powerful actors that will require land and ecosystems not yet under their control. Those strategies threaten to displace or otherwise dispossess the current owners and stewards of targeted lands – in particular indigenous peoples and local communities.

Equity becomes a central concern in this contested space. Powerful actors demand and secure access to lands and forests, prioritizing the needs of wealthy countries, corporations, and other global elites to offset their consumption and destruction over the needs and rights to land, life, and livelihoods of indigenous peoples, local communities, species, and ecosystems.

One of the main means by which nature is turned into NbS is through the narratives, techniques, and technologies of economic valuation. In the time of the climate crisis, ecosystems are reduced in value to the carbon they contain. Once reduced to their constituent carbon, the carbon-rich elements of ecosystems – most often trees and soils – can be traded on markets. The carbon in land and forests may be further reinvented and repackaged as an “asset class” for new means of capital accumulation through speculation and financialization. 

Carbon gains in value as its scarcity rises. Scarcity is currently being manufactured through thousands of “net zero” pledges and the misunderstandings, unintentional or deliberate, of what “net zero” actually means and what sorts of actions it requires. The erroneous interpretation holds that emissions might continue as long as there are offsets available to be purchased in carbon-rich lands and forests. However, the actions “net zero” actually requires preclude offsetting – fossil fuel emissions must be reduced as close to zero as possible and ecosystems restored and protected. 

If misinterpretations are ignored and emissions-as-usual continue, there will be little contribution that nature can make in the end to addressing climate change. As temperatures rise, ecosystems will begin to collapse, liberating carbon and further contributing to catastrophic positive feedback cycles. Climate change is, of course, one of the primary drivers of biodiversity loss. The threat of runaway climate change is creating a landing ground for arguments to expand geoengineering research and experimentation, which poses other unique dangers for biodiversity, indigenous peoples, and local communities.

The storyline from NbS to geoengineering has its twists and turns, through net zero pledges and the financialisation of nature. And it has common threads holding it together, philosophies and ideologies that underpin its neoliberal and neocolonial approaches to nature and its defenders.

 by Doreen Stabinsky, College of the Atlantic

This is the Introduction to the full paper which will be available upon publication at www.twn.my