Bionic Planet: Reversing Climate Change by Restoring Nature

When US President Donald Trump disbanded his country's pandemic response team, he did so because "I don't like having thousands of people around when we don't need them."

That cost-cutting measure could cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and it's a classic example of what happens when we value efficiency over resilience.

What are efficiency and resilience?

Today we draw on the work of Cardiff University Lecturer Paul Nieuwenhuis to find out.

Costa Rica says it will have zero net greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, and its electrical grid already runs on 99 percent renewable energy.

Today's guest is a key part of its success.

As Minister of Environment, Energy and Telecommunications, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez has overseen programs that tripled the country's forest coverage while slashing its use of fossil fuels -- all while growing its economy.

Today's guest, Daniel Palken, volunteers with a group called the Citizens Climate Lobby, or "CCL", which aims to slash US greenhouse-gas emissions by imposing a fee on fossil fuels.

The fee will be based on the amount of greenhouse gas that the coal, gasoline, and jet fuels will generate when we burn them, and it will probably make fossil-fuel energy more expensive.

But there's a catch -- or, the opposite of a catch... a bonus -- a dividend, if you will, because that's what CCL calls it.

Under the proposed "Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act," all money raised by the carbon fee will go back to US citizens in the form of a dividend.

We each pay into the system based on how much energy we use -- whether in the form of an extra few cents at the pump or slightly higher groceries -- but every single citizen gets the same dividend back.

A fee-and-dividend system is different from the cap-and-trade programs that I usually focus on, for lots of reasons we get into.

Daniel says that a fee-and-dividend scenario has bilateral support, especially among younger Republicans, and he has the data to back that up.

Developing countries are the most vulnerable to – and least responsible for – climate change, but new research shows that some of them can dramatically boost their economies by managing their forests, farms, and fields in ways that pull greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.

At a carbon price of $50 for every metric ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, for example, Costa Rica can go beyond net-zero and end up pulling four times as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as its entire economy emits right now. At that same carbon price, the Central African Republic can use NCS strategies to boost its GDP a staggering 90 percent.

Authored by scientists from 17 organizations, the new paper looks at 12 natural climate solutions across 79 tropical countries and identifies activities that can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6.6 billion metric tons per year – ore more than all of the emissions generated by the United States – at a price of $50 per ton or lower.

"We found a wide variance among countries in the types of interventions that can deliver results," said lead author Bronson Griscom, Senior Director of Natural Climate Solutions for Conservation International. "The Solomon Islands, for example, can make tremendous gains by managing their production forests more effectively, while Kenya can make tremendous gains by doing the same with agriculture."

The paper comes at a critical moment in human development, with humankind now actively managing more than half of Earth's ice-free land.

"The human footprint is expanding, and the population is still growing, but the rate of population growth is declining," says Griscom on an episode of the Bionic Planet podcast scheduled to drop on January 28. "Meanwhile, our technology – our practices for agriculture – are continuing to improve so that we can produce more food per hectare from one decade to the next."

We have, he says, the know-how to feed the world and reduce our footprint at the same time, but it comes as climate change threatens to decimate the world's living ecosystems.

"This is hundreds of years in the making, and we're at this inflection point now," he says. "Ecotopia is out there, but so is climate change with all its potential tipping points in ecosystems and looming mass migration due to societal collapse."

It's an all-or-nothing proposition.

"We have all of these solutions in front of us, and we have this ticking clock," he says. "We know what to do, and we have the means of doing it, but we have just a decade to do it."

With so many different countries and so many different economies, he sees a phased approach where some countries move now and others follow in their wake.

"Some countries have the resources and governance to move right now," he says. "The idea is, 'Let's help those countries move quickly now, and let's invest this decade in helping those other countries to prepare for major actions.'"

There's a lot of money sloshing around forests, and most of it goes into agricultural subsidies and investments that destroy forests, while only a trickle goes into programs that save them.

That's why today's guest, Charlotte Streck, wants to implement a Marshall Plan for Forests.

On the eve of year-end climate talks in Madrid, I revisit my 2017 conversation with Bronson Griscom, Director of Forest Carbon Science for the Nature Conservancy. He headed up a team of three dozen researchers from almost two dozen institutions tasked with identifying once and for all the realistic potential of using nature as a bulwark against climate change. The result is a report called "Natural Climate Solutions", which identifies 20 low-cost, natural "pathways" that can get us 37 percent of the way to meeting the Paris Climate Agreement targets -- sometimes at no cost, sometimes at just $10 per ton, and often while increasing food yields and reducing the cost of farming.

The third episode of our three-part look at the birth of REDD+, we speak with Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Related Articles:

"Shades of REDD+: A Marshall Plan for Tropical Forests?"

Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/shades-of-redd-a-marshall-plan-for-tropical-forests/

"Forests, Farms, and the Global Carbon Sink: The Genesis"

Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/forests-farms-global-carbon-sink-genesis/

In this second part of our three-part series on the history of forests in the Paris Climate Agreement, we hear how REDD+ got its name and made its way into the climate negotiations. Special Guest: Kevin Conrad of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations

2019 is shaping up to be a pivotal summer in a pivotal year in the critical race to meet the climate challenge, with major media finally discovering the role that healthy forests can play in fixing the mess.

In this episode, we examine the 40-year effort to slow climate change by saving forests. It's the first of three parts developed in accompaniment with the Ecosystem Marketplace series "Forests, Farms, and the Global Carbon Sink: It's Happening"

Guest: Kevin Conrad, Coalition for Rainforest Nations

We eat to live, but the food we're eating is killing us – not just because of what it does to our bodies, but because of what it does to our climate.

Beef, for example, comes from cows that burp out methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps up to 80-times more heat than carbon dioxide does, and we often chop carbon-absorbing forests to graze those methane-emitting cows, only to throw away one-third of all the food we produce.

If there are two things scientists who study this stuff agree on, it's that we can slow climate change by eating less meat and wasting less food, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) new Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), which was published this morning in Geneva.