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What Exactly Are "Nature-based Solutions”?

In the Seychelles archipelago in East Africa, flooding and erosion caused by rising sea levels pose an imminent threat to the country’s many low-lying islands. At the same time its mangrove forests, which serve as a vital buffer against these impacts, are disappearing: Approximately 70% of Seychelles mangroves have been destroyed since the late 1700s due to human-driven development and agriculture as well as soil erosion from sea-level rise.

Today the Seychelles Government is working with local community leaders to restore the mangroves, and not just for protection against rising seas. Research shows that these forests can store about 2.5 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent (equal to taking 500,000 cars off the road for a year), directly helping to fight climate change. They also provide a breeding ground for fisheries, a sector that contributes one-fifth of the country’s GDP, benefiting local communities’ livelihoods and helping to protect the islands’ vibrant biodiversity.

This is just one example of a nature-based solution, a project which harnesses the power of ecosystems to benefit people, nature and climate.

Why Are Nature-based Solutions on the Rise?

While the concept of using nature to benefit both lives and lands is by no means new, global interest in "nature-based solutions" has skyrocketed in recent years. Many now see nature-based solutions as a key approach for addressing not only climate change but a range of social, environmental and economic challenges simultaneously — from biodiversity loss, food security and air pollution to disease control and declining local economies.

Yet there remains widespread debate about what exactly constitutes a nature-based solution as well as how to best incorporate these strategies into broader climate and conservation efforts. This uncertainty has contributed to significant underinvestment: It’s estimated that to limit temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), halt biodiversity loss and curb land degradation, annual investments in nature-based approaches must triple by 2030.

As nature-based solutions continue to rise on the global agenda, building a more coherent understanding around the concept and its implications will be key to raising support for effective, scalable solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Here’s what to know.

What Exactly Are Nature-based Solutions?

Broadly, nature-based solutions are actions to protect, conserve, restore, and sustainably use and manage ecosystems in a way that addresses social, economic and environmental challenges while simultaneously benefiting human well-being and biodiversity. In other words, they are interventions that use nature and the natural functions of healthy ecosystems to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time. By contrast, actions that simply minimize humans’ impact on nature, such as reducing waste or decreasing water use, are not considered nature-based solutions.

A central feature of nature-based solutions is that they can deliver a range of positive outcomes or “co-benefits” alongside their intended outcomes. For example, in Mumbai, India, the state government’s initiative to create a 3.2-acre urban forest can not only help address urban heat island effects — with the potential to cool temperatures in the area by up to 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) — but will also provide recreational spaces for local communities. In Burundi, terraces of trees and fodder crops intended to control soil erosion over steep hillsides also build resilience to landslides, sequester carbon and help increase agricultural productivity. And a restored wetland in Chennai, India aims to increase the resilience of nearby communities to floods while improving water supply and quality and providing habitat for wildlife.

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How Mounting Demand for Rubber Is Driving Tropical Forest Loss

BY FRED PEARCE - Yale Environment 360

The growing market for rubber is a major, but largely overlooked, cause of tropical deforestation, new analysis shows. Most of the rubber goes to produce tires, more than 2 billion a year, and experts warn the transition to electric vehicles could accelerate rubber use.

he elephants are gone. The trees are logged out. The Beng Per Wildlife Sanctuary in central Cambodia is largely destroyed, after being handed over by the government to a politically well-connected local plantation company to grow rubber.

In West Africa, the Luxembourg-based plantations giant Socfin has been accused in recent weeks of deforestation and displacing Indigenous people around its rubber plantations in Nigeria and Ghana.

Meanwhile, on the heavily deforested Indonesian island of Sumatra, tire multinational Michelin and a local forestry company raised $95 million worth of green investment bonds on the promise that they would reforest bare land with rubber trees. But the NGO Mighty Earth has found that much of the plantation went ahead on land from which natural forest had been removed as recently as a few months before by a subsidiary of the local company.

These are just three examples among hundreds of one of the biggest, but least discussed, causes of tropical deforestation. The spread of rubber plantations is driven primarily by our demand for more than 2 billion new tires each year. The full devastating impact of this has been exposed by a new analysis of high-resolution satellite images that can, for the first time, distinguish rubber plantations from natural forests.

But even as the true environmental cost of the ubiquitous rubber tire is being exposed, the damage could be about to escalate sharply. The new culprit is electric vehicles. Being substantially heavier than conventional vehicles, they reduce the life of a tire by up to 30 percent, and so could raise demand for rubber by the same amount.

Natural rubber is a milky latex harvested manually by tapping the bark of the Hevea brasiliensis, a tree originally from the Amazon that is now grown widely in plantations, especially in Southeast Asia. World demand has been rising by more than 3 percent a year. But with no sign of increased yields on plantations, that requires ever more land to keep pace.

Yet there has been little outrage. While growers and processors of other tropical commodity crops, such as soy, beef, palm oil, cocoa, and coffee, are under ever greater pressure from both regulators and consumers to show their products are not grown on land deforested to accommodate them, rubber has escaped public attention. When did you last see deforestation-free rubber tires advertised?

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Indian companies are bringing one of the world’s most toxic industries to Africa. People are getting sick.

By: Will Fitzgibbon, The Examination

Families near battery recycling plants face “dangerous" levels of lead in their blood and in soil, testing shows.

At noon, dusk, and in the dead of night, Cyrille Traoré Ndembi grabs his phone and films his nearest neighbor.

The battery recycling factory roars, rattling Ndembi’s bed. Its chimneys belch smoke into the air, sending bitter odors through the windows of the family’s concrete home. Ndembi’s front garden, where his children play, is sprinkled with a black dust laced with lead — one of the most dangerous metals on the planet.

Ndembi calls one chimney “the tower of death.”

Since moving to Vindoulou, a sandy grid of shacks and homes off the main highway in the Republic of Congo, four years ago, Ndembi’s wife and daughters have suffered from pneumonia, bronchitis, and persistent coughs, medical records show.

“With lead, they say it’s a strong, slow poison,” said Ndembi, 59, who is fighting alongside his neighbors to have the factory moved or closed. “It kills little by little.”

The owner, Metssa Trading, came to Africa from India more than two decades ago under the name Metafrique, seizing upon cheap material, labor and some of the weakest social and environmental protections in the world.

The company is now one of Central Africa’s most prominent recyclers of used automotive batteries; boxes of plastic, chemicals, and metal that — when chopped to pieces and melted inside 2,000-degree Fahrenheit ovens — produce the lead essential to most cars on the road today.

Experts call battery recycling the most polluting industry in the world. At its worst, industry emissions — smoke, dust, chemicals, water runoff — contaminate the environment for generations and the body for a lifetime. The market in Africa is expected to grow to more than $6 billion within this decade.

Yet while India introduced its first lead battery rules requiring recycling companies to adopt safe practices in its own country more than 20 years ago, the Republic of Congo, like other countries in Africa, hasn’t done the same.

Now, officials in New Delhi are celebrating the charge of Indian operations into Africa, which include battery recycling facilities in at least eight countries. India recently dispatched one of its ambassadors in West Africa to inaugurate a plant that had been stockpiling lead batteries. Indian investments in Africa have grown by more than $20 billion in four years, officials say, and government funding for projects across the continent are on the rise. “The sky is the limit,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in August.

This support comes amid growing evidence that Indian lead recycling companies are among the top polluters on the continent and are poisoning nearby communities, an investigation by The Examination, The Museba Project in Cameroon, and Ghana Business News in Ghana has found.

One major Indian recycler was determined by scientists to have contaminated soil not far from schools and churches in West Africa by thousands of times the level that would require cleanup in the United States. Another company, named for an elephant-headed Hindu god, was briefly closed by authorities in Senegal after health violations. Residents in one Kenyan community have tried for years in local court to sue an Indian-owned company, alleging the factory caused sickness and death.

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By: Grist.org

Australia urged not to rely on ‘drug dealer’s defence’ for gas exports and help wean Japan off fossil fuels

Diplomats for Climate group says if government wants to use that defence ‘it needs to be the dealer who takes their clients to rehab and supports them off their habit’

The Albanese government should do more to leverage its relationship with Japan – arguably the world’s most important energy partnership – to help its trading partner move away from gas and towards a rapid and ambitious decarbonisation, former diplomats say.

Diplomats for Climate, an organisation supported by more than 100 former Australian officials, says “the future of gas lies in the ground” but that a ban on new fossil fuel developments – the focus of a growing community campaign that argues that is what the scientific evidence demands – would not cut global emissions unless international demand was reduced.

Australia is one of the world’s three biggest fossil fuel exporters but the ex-diplomats say its coal and gas exports meet only about 4.8% and 2.8% of global demand respectively. They say Australia’s supply would likely be replaced by other exporting countries if it simply stopped.

In a submission to the government on the future of the gas industry before the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai, Diplomats for Climate said it placed an onus on Australia to leverage “its strong reputation and history as a reliable energy supplier” to encourage its trading partners to quickly cut reliance on fossil fuels. That meant not merely relying on the “drug dealer’s defence” – arguing that if Australia did not sell a harmful product, someone else would.

“Diplomats for Climate wants to see rapid and dramatic decreases in fossil fuel production, but this will only reduce global emissions if driven by rapid and dramatic reductions in demand,” the group’s executive director, Janaline Oh, said.

“If the government wants to use the drug dealer’s defence it needs to be the dealer who takes their clients to rehab and supports them off their habit.”

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