Natural Climate Solutions for Ecosystem Restoration

Natural climate solutions encompass the conservation, restoration and sustainable management of ecosystems to enhance carbon storage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By working with biological systems such as forests, wetlands, grasslands and agricultural landscapes, these approaches mobilise nature’s inherent capacity to sequester carbon, regulate hydrological cycles and bolster resilience to climate extremes. Ecosystem restoration under this framework involves both the protection of intact habitats and the rehabilitation of degraded lands, seeking to recover ecological function, biodiversity and livelihoods. Effective implementation demands integration with agricultural and land-use planning, coordination of measurement and monitoring systems, and alignment with social equity and governance structures. While not a substitute for rapid decarbonisation of energy systems, natural climate solutions offer a vital, cost-effective complement that can deliver co-benefits for biodiversity, water security and community well-being across tropical, temperate and boreal regions.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have combined multiple data sources to refine estimates of the world’s forest carbon potential, revealing a global deficit of approximately 226 Gt C in areas with low human impact and highlighting opportunities for both protection and active restoration to recover this gap. Building on such quantification efforts, a distillation of principles for natural climate solutions has articulated five foundational criteria—nature-based, sustainable, additional, measurable and equitable—alongside operational guidelines to ensure robust design, governance and social inclusion in restoration projects. Complementing these insights, an expert review examined 43 distinct pathways, confirming the strong scientific basis of well-established interventions like tropical forest conservation, while identifying uncertainties in measurement and accounting for certain land-management practices and urging resolution of these gaps before large-scale market deployment.

Natural Climate Solutions for Ecosystem Restoration publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in natural climate solutions for ecosystem restoration across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Natural climate solutions (NCS): A suite of conservation, restoration and land-management practices that enhance carbon storage or avoid greenhouse gas emissions in ecosystems.

Carbon sequestration: The process by which atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants, soils and other natural reservoirs, reducing atmospheric concentrations.

Irrecoverable carbon: Ecosystem carbon stocks that, if lost, cannot be recovered within climate-relevant timescales (by mid-century).

Ecosystem restoration: The process of assisting the recovery of degraded, damaged or destroyed ecosystems to regain functionality and services.

References

1. Integrated global assessment of the natural forest carbon potential. Nature (2023).
2. The principles of natural climate solutions. Nature Communications (2024).
3. Expert review of the science underlying nature-based climate solutions. Nature Climate Change (2024).
4. Getting the message right on nature‐based solutions to climate change. Global Change Biology (2021).
5. Ten golden rules for reforestation to optimize carbon sequestration, biodiversity recovery and livelihood benefits. Global Change Biology (2021).
6. National mitigation potential from natural climate solutions in the tropics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (2020).