Category: Policy

This piece was jointly authored by Alex Rudee with the World Resources Institute and Jenn Phillips with the U.S. Climate Alliance and was originally published by the World Resources Institute.

Inventories of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are a critical tool in the fight against climate change. GHG inventories allow entities like countries, states, cities and businesses to measure how much progress they are making toward meeting emissions-reduction targets, such as those set under the Paris Climate Agreement. Climate policies at all levels of government are also informed by data in GHG inventories. 

The U.S. Climate Alliance has facilitated ambitious state-level action on climate change since 2017, when the United States government announced its intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. To support states’ technical needs in building and implementing these climate action plans — including by developing robust GHG inventories — the U.S. Climate Alliance has convened an “Impact Partnership” of nonprofit organizations with relevant expertise, including WRI. Through that partnership, WRI and the U.S. Climate Alliance have published a guide for states to develop and improve their GHG inventories with an eye toward one particular sector that has often been shortchanged: natural and working lands (NWL). But to understand why a state-level guide specific to land-based GHG inventories is needed, it’s important to first know what a GHG inventory is, why inventories are produced and how they are created.

Inventory Basics: What, Why and How

1.    What is a GHG inventory?

An inventory accounts for all human-caused emissions and removals of GHGs associated with a specific entity. The inventory essentially acts as a climate change balance sheet, tracking the total volume of GHG emitted from sources like fossil fuel consumption and agricultural production alongside the volume of GHG removed by sequestration in plants and soils or through technological means. Good inventories transparently report their data sources and methodologies so the calculations and assumptions that underlie GHG estimates are clear. Typically, entities produce GHG inventories annually or on some other regular schedule to monitor changes in their GHG emissions and removals over time.

2.    Why produce a GHG inventory?

As the saying goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Measuring GHG emissions and removals through GHG inventories is therefore a necessary first step to manage our collective carbon footprint. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has required participating nations, including the United States, to produce and submit annual GHG inventories since 1997 to measure progress toward international climate goals. In more recent years, many U.S. states have voluntarily published their own GHG inventories to inform development of state climate action plans and provide accountability for their emissions reduction goals.

With the U.S. government and the U.S. Climate Alliance’s recent commitment to reduce collective net GHG emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve overall net-zero GHG emissions no later than 2050, the accuracy and comprehensiveness of these inventories has never been more paramount. Achieving net-zero at both the federal and state levels will require concerted action — not only to reduce emissions throughout the economy, but also to increase carbon removals, including the management of natural and working lands. 

NWL, which include forests, croplands, grasslands, wetlands and urban trees and soils, make up the only sector in the U.S. that removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, reducing total U.S. emissions by nearly 800 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, or about 12% of U.S. gross emissions. This increase in land-based carbon storage, which overwhelmingly comes from forest growth, offsets the 10% of gross U.S. emissions from agricultural production. Emissions from agricultural production, which includes soil fertilization, manure management, enteric fermentation and other sources related to crop and livestock cultivation, are typically considered separately from NWL in GHG inventories.

With additional investment in conservation, restoration and land management, the amount of carbon removed by NWL in the U.S. can grow significantly, offsetting a greater portion of U.S. gross emissions and moving the U.S. closer to meeting its ambitious GHG reduction targets.

3.    How are Natural and Working Lands included in GHG inventories?

Unlike GHG emissions from fossil fuel combustion, which are easily tracked through publicly reported energy use data, emissions and removals from NWL are more difficult to measure. These emissions and removals are occurring constantly over millions of acres due to farming and forestry operations alongside natural ecosystem carbon cycles, making universal monitoring very challenging. In many cases, scientists are also still refining our understanding of how land management practices like forest restoration or conservation tillage impact GHG flows in those environments. Therefore, GHG inventories typically rely on sample data to estimate the area of NWL within certain classifications and GHG models or approximate “emission factors” to estimate GHG emissions and removals as a function of area. 

These challenges illustrate why estimates of land-based emissions and removals in GHG inventories are typically much more uncertain than energy emissions. Contributors to the uncertainty include:

• Timeliness of data inputs (how long ago data were collected).
• Spatial and temporal resolution of inventory data (how finely data can be mapped over space and time).
• Gaps in inventory coverage (which sources of emissions and removals are omitted).
• Error in GHG models and emission factors (how accurately the calculations mirror real-world emissions and removals).

These challenges are compounded at the state level, where most states lack the resources to develop their own inventories and have had to depend on federal data and tools with significant limitations. Many states, for example, use the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) State Inventory Tool (SIT), which applies the same methods and data sources used for EPA’s National GHG Inventory at the state level. However, much of the data on land-based emissions and removals used in the National Inventory is not available at the state level, so SIT has relied on older and less accurate data to fill gaps. SIT also does not publish measures of uncertainty. For these reasons, many states have opted to leave NWL out of their GHG inventories entirely, while others that do include SIT estimates for that sector have cautioned against relying on them for goal-setting or policymaking purposes.

How to Improve GHG Inventories for Natural and Working Lands

Fortunately, a mix of current and emerging datasets and technologies can help states improve their estimates of GHG emissions and removals from NWL. These inventory improvement options have the potential to not only address specific limitations of SIT, but could also provide even more accurate and granular information than the National Inventory. More accurate, more transparent and higher resolution estimates of NWL emissions and removals can help state governments set robust climate targets specifically for NWL in addition to measuring progress toward existing goals, informing new climate policies and underlying plans for climate-smart land management.

Most options for states to improve the NWL data in their inventories follow one or both of two strategies. Either the state can collect new field measurement data, for example by adding to the Forest Service’s network of forest inventory plots or by measuring carbon in soil samples; or the state can use remote sensing tools like LiDAR and satellite imagery to complement existing data from field measurements. 

All inventory improvements come with costs, so states will need to prioritize improvements based on their potential impact, policy relevance and feasibility. WRI’s Guide to NWL Inventory Improvements walks states through available options for improving inventory data for each land use type included in a NWL inventory along with factors to consider in deciding where to prioritize limited state resources.

Several U.S. states have already begun to implement innovations in their NWL inventories. In March 2021, Maryland committed to replace forest data from SIT with a new inventory method that uses high-resolution LiDAR and satellite imagery to model forest carbon over time, based on research conducted by the University of Maryland and WRI under a grant from the U.S. Climate Alliance. Across the country, California, Oregon and Washington have all worked with the Forest Service to develop state-specific estimates of carbon in wood products, allowing them to update the decades-old data in SIT. Even farther west, Hawai’i partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey to create its first NWL inventory, as most of the federal datasets that underlie SIT did not include data for Hawai’i.

These are just a few of the exciting innovations states are pursuing to improve their inventories. But many other states lack the resources or capacity to take on their own improvement projects and the need for more national coordination and consistent, quality GHG estimation tools and NWL datasets that can be utilized by every state remains. Therefore, it’s clear that federal investment is paramount. Recent federal efforts, like the publication of new Forest Service research in 2020 that quantified forest carbon emissions and removals at the state level, help move the ball forward — but there is still much room for improvement.

3 Ways the Federal Government Can Help Improve State Inventories

The Guide to NWL Inventory Improvements identified three key needs across states, spanning the key NWL systems of forests, agricultural soils and wetlands, where the federal government would be best positioned to lead inventory improvements. With President Biden restoring the United States to a leadership role on climate action hours after becoming president, these opportunities offer common sense steps to advance the role of NWL in climate action plans at all levels of government.

1. Develop a national remote sensing-based forest and land use inventory.

The National GHG Inventory and SIT rely on data from the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory & Analysis program (FIA), which is among the most comprehensive forest monitoring systems in the world, but was not designed to meet current demands for precise carbon data at a variety of scales. Using federal data products like Landsat and GEDI, the federal government could complement FIA with remote sensing data to map and model carbon emissions and removals across the landscape, reducing uncertainty in forest carbon estimates. 

2. Monitor soil carbon through national field networks.

Carbon sequestration in agricultural soils is currently modeled, not measured, to calculate GHG estimates in the National Inventory and SIT, leading to uncertainty of over 1,000% nationally for some soil carbon removal estimates. Regular, systematic collection of soil carbon field measurements through the federal National Resources Inventory (NRI) could help refine models and reduce this uncertainty dramatically. The National Academies of Sciences has estimated the cost of this endeavor at just $5 million per year.

3. Develop a national spatial inventory of GHG emissions in wetlands.

Wetlands are among the least-understood contributors to GHG emissions from NWL. No consistent data on wetland GHG emissions exist at the state level, and even the National Inventory does not account for GHG emissions from most terrestrial, or freshwater, wetlands. The federal government could improve this understanding by creating a high-resolution spatial dataset to monitor changes in wetland extent, vegetation and management, incorporating existing data from the Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) and National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) where relevant, and pairing it with a network of field plots to derive regionally-specific emission factors for different wetland types. 

Helping States Lead the Way on GHG Inventories for Natural and Working Lands

For the last four years, states have been forging ahead with climate action even as the federal government rolled back environmental regulations and withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement. States in the U.S. Climate Alliance have led the way in linking land management to climate change mitigation through the NWL Challenge, but they need better data and inventory methods in order to act boldly and effectively. Some states have jumped out ahead by experimenting with new methods for carbon monitoring in NWL, but federal action has the unique ability to “lift all boats” when it comes to data quality and consistency. As it now re-engages on climate change at home and abroad, the federal government has an opportunity to put wind under the wings of state leadership by investing in the tools they need to monitor and manage land for a climate-friendly future.

Alex Rudee is a Manager for U.S. Natural Climate Solutions at World Resources Institute. Jenn Phillips is a Senior Policy Advisor for Natural and Working Lands and Resilience at U.S. Climate Alliance. Both Alex and Jenn serve on the U.S. Nature4Climate steering committee.

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world today. Its impacts can be seen clearly as sea levels continue to rise, heat waves become more frequent and storms intensify. To help avoid some of the worst impacts yet to come, immediate action is needed to not only stop further greenhouse gas emissions, but also to remove the carbon dioxide (CO₂) that is already in the air.

In March, Massachusetts passed An Act Creating a Next-Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy, a groundbreaking and ambitious law that sets a net zero emissions goal–the new global standard–and requires the Commonwealth to decarbonize our economy by decreasing our use of fossil fuels and harnessing nature to draw carbon from the air.

“The new law reflects Governor Charlie Baker’s and the state legislature’s recognition that climate change impacts are touching down in the Commonwealth’s communities today, and we need to address the causes and effects to protect our future,” says Steve Long, director of government relations for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Massachusetts. “Once again, Massachusetts policymakers have modeled bipartisan collaboration and leadership to address climate change that should serve as inspiration for policymakers on the national stage.”

The law also provides a robust toolkit of policies and strategies—such as requirements and incentives to reduce emissions from energy production, transportation, and buildings—and ensures accountability by setting goals for interim carbon emissions reductions between now and 2050.

TNC led the advocacy for the inclusion of Natural Climate Solutions in the legislation. As the bill moved through the Senate and House of Representatives, we heard bipartisan support for the benefits of Natural Climate Solutions. During Senate floor debate, Senator Jo Comerford (D-Northampton) said, “We will not achieve the reductions we need without carbon sequestration and storage. It is our Commonwealth that has the lungs of New England.” And House Minority Leader Brad Jones (R-North Reading) noted that, “A comprehensive, multi-faceted approach is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Using forests and other natural and working lands to promote carbon sequestration is one of the most effective ways for the state to achieve its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.”  

Natural Climate Solutions are strategies that protect, restore, and better manage natural and working lands—such as forests, farms, and wetlands—to remove carbon from the air and store it long term. We believe this law is the first in the nation to require the state to set goals for both reducing emissions from and increasing sequestration by natural and working lands, and to create a plan to achieve those goals.

Massachusetts’ forests currently remove the equivalent of nearly five million metric tons of CO₂ from the air each year, an amount equal to nearly seven percent of our carbon emissions. Natural Climate Solutions have the potential to remove an additional one to two million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent per year across the state—about the same amount of carbon as is emitted by 435,000 cars annually.

In addition to capturing carbon, implementing Natural Climate Solutions can bring communities many other benefits, as well. For example, protecting forests and wetlands helps clean our water and air and provides habitat for wildlife. Better managing farmland ensures healthy soils and can increase agricultural yields. And restoring wetlands and salt marshes helps reduce flood risks and enhances our fisheries. In urban areas, tree planting and creating green space can reduce the heat island effect, lower energy use in nearby buildings and reduce air pollution to improve public health.

As we move forward, it is also critical to ensure a just transition to a decarbonized economy and address the disproportionate impacts of climate change felt by underserved and overburdened communities. The new law includes important environmental justice provisions designed to enhance review of the health and cumulative impacts of projects proposed in communities with environmental justice populations and to ensure that residents have reasonable access and information to meaningfully engage in the public processes concerning those projects. TNC was proud to support environmental justice partners in advocating for these protections.

“The requirement in the new law that cumulative impacts be considered reflects the reality that the health and well-being of our communities and our environment are inextricably linked,” says Eugenia Gibbons, Massachusetts director of climate policy at Health Care Without Harm. “The environmental justice protections mark an important step towards ensuring that communities historically excluded from decision making that has left them burdened by environmental harm have reasonable access to information and an opportunity to engage meaningfully going forward.” 

At the same time TNC was advocating for the climate legislation, they led a working group on the state’s climate council to inform the science and policy recommendations for natural climate solutions in the Commonwealth’s 2030 Clean Energy and Climate Plan. The plan prioritizes the state’s action for the next ten years and will guide implementation of strategies to meet emissions reductions targets in the law. TNC collaborated with climate justice partners to jointly develop a policy framework and recommend Natural Climate Solutions strategies for equity and justice. 

“The legislation signed by Governor Baker is supported by a comprehensive, science-based analysis with significant stakeholder input that took place over a two-year period, culminating with the Administration’s 2050 Decarbonization Roadmap and Clean Energy and Climate Plan,” says Kathleen Theoharides, Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary for Massachusetts. “As we move toward implementing this nation-leading legislation, including important provisions around natural working lands and protecting our environmental justice communities, the Baker-Polito Administration remains committed to achieving our climate goals in an equitable manner that protects our most vulnerable residents.”

TNC in Massachusetts could not have realized our accomplishments without a team effort that provided an effective combination of policy and science, which included Steve Long, Laura Marx, forest ecologist and Emily Myron, policy manager.

An Act Creating a Next-Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy is formative legislation that could be emulated across the U.S., bringing people together across the aisle and leading to important and impactful changes for the future of people and nature.

Loren Dowd is a Marketing and Communications Manager at The Nature Conservancy.

From extreme droughts, flooding, and fires to altered migration patterns and “hoot owl” fishing restrictions, America’s sportsmen and women have seen firsthand the impacts of a changing climate. If we are to protect and restore the habitats that support all the species we love to pursue, the hunting and fishing community must be part of climate change solutions.

There is no one silver bullet or single set of actions that will turn the tides entirely—climate change can only be addressed with a comprehensive strategy that involves all of us and all the tools we have. Thankfully, this includes habitat conservation measures already supported by sportsmen and women.

Here are six habitat improvement strategies that provide this win-win proposition: better hunting and fishing opportunities and fewer climate-change-driven impacts to fish and wildlife.

Improve Forest Management

The nation’s forests provide habitat for wildlife, shade to cool trout streams, and many convenient places to hang a tree stand, but they also store carbon—keeping carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere and warming the globe. In fact, across the world, forests store as much as one-third of all emissions from burning fossil fuels or about 2.6 billion tons of carbon each year.

Forests also draw additional carbon out of the atmosphere. Young, healthy growing forests mostly sequester carbon while older forests store it, which is why it helps to have diverse, well-managed forests. Unfortunately, decades of fire suppression and past management practices have left many public forests in poor health and vulnerable to uncharacteristically large wildfires. Poorly managed forests can alter the carbon storage and sequestration balance.

Hunters and anglers are already advocating for reforestation, active management of young stands, and conservation of late-successional forests, because these measures promote diverse habitat conditions, reduce fire risk, and filter polluted runoff that would otherwise harm trout and salmon streams. But these are also natural climate solutions. One of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s s top priorities this year is pushing decision-makers to ensure that savings from the recent wildfire funding fix will go toward forest health and management. This is just one step toward securing more of the habitat and climate benefits of our national forests.

Reverse Grasslands Loss

Native grasslands are being lost at an alarming rate due to agricultural conversion, development, and other factors. Just like forests, degraded western rangelands and grasslands are less resilient to temperature and weather changes, and their carbon storage and sequestering benefits are altered as more habitat damage is done. Invasive species like cheatgrass now dominate many sagebrush landscapes and have dramatically altered this ecosystem’s productivity, stability, and fire regime.

But grasslands and shrub communities also absorb huge amounts of carbon.

Restoration and conservation of rangelands and grasslands will be an important component of a broad-scale, comprehensive habitat and climate resilience strategy. We need to stop converting these habitats and focus on restoring grasslands to increase their resilience and productivity.

Conserve and Restore Wetlands

Inland and coastal wetlands, marshes, estuaries, swamps, deltas, and floodplains are among nature’s most productive ecosystems—providing vital habitat for migratory waterfowl and both fresh and saltwater species of gamefish—that also store carbon.

Wetlands across the country already provide critical habitat, reduce erosion, improve water quality, and filter flood waters to protect our communities. But they are also being lost—drained, developed, converted to crops, or damaged beyond repair.

We are still fighting the rollback of Clean Water Act protections that has stripped wetlands and headwater streams of the safeguards that could prevent further wetlands loss.

Globally, wetlands may presently sequester as much as 700 billion tons of carbon each year. Once drained or partially dried, these areas may become a net source of methane and carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. They are also particularly vulnerable to climate change. Rising temperatures and increased drought can convert permanent wetlands to semi-permanent or seasonal ones.

We need to protect our remaining wetlands and reverse the loss while restoring those that have been altered to help meet the nation’s goals for flood control, clean water, habitat, and carbon reduction.

Boost Farm Bill Conservation Programs

Roughly 40 percent of the United States is in agricultural production. This sector represents about 9 percent of all carbon emissions, but farmers and ranchers also contribute significantly to carbon storage and sequestration when they manage and preserve grasslands, wetlands, and forests.

Our community is already preparing to work with Congress on a 2023 Farm Bill with strong conservation funding, and this would give landowners more of a chance to contribute to climate change solutions, as well. Increasing Conservation Reserve Program acreage to 50 million acres, for example, would enhance the habitat benefits for whitetail and mule deer, prairie chickens, pheasants, quail, wild turkeys, waterfowl, and countless other species—not to mention provide better hunting and fishing experiences for the sportsmen and women who rely on CRP lands for access.

Boosting the CRP would also give landowners the option to conserve grasslands and wetlands that combat climate change. Expanding this and other conservation programs would be a great starting point for strengthening the role that private landowners play in the climate fight.

Continue the Gulf Coast Comeback

Rising seas have already destroyed thousands of miles of coastline and hundreds of thousands of acres of coastal salt marshes and seagrass beds that are vital to many sportfish and waterfowl. Louisiana’s more seasoned duck hunters can likely point to actual ground they once hunted that has now been lost.

The good news is that building coastal infrastructure is a viable solution to fight these catastrophic losses.

Reparation funds from the BP oil spill have already helped to rebuild habitat health beyond what was damaged in the environmental disaster and recover some of what has been lost to subsidence, erosion, and sea-level rise.

The continued conservation and restoration of these habitats can help save lives and protect coastal communities, while providing healthier fisheries, cleaner water, and enhancing resilience to climate change. We need to ensure federal programs and funding are available to identify areas for protection, restoration, or management and to develop effective strategies to sustain the natural benefits of coastal habitats.

Shore Up Streambanks

One of the most obvious impacts of climate change for America’s anglers is rising water temperatures that threaten coldwater trout species. This is compounded in places where streams have been degraded by major floods, wildfires, dam construction and land-use changes. Many conservation volunteers cut their teeth on projects aimed at restoring healthy stream flows, reducing streambank erosion, and ultimately lowering water temperatures, but they may not realize riparian areas have an underappreciated ability to store carbon, both in vegetation and the soil itself.

At the federal level, we will need to invest in numerous solutions to build resilient river systems and ensure our lakes, rivers, and streams are able to function as productive carbon sinks while also supporting the fish and wildlife we love to pursue. Programs and policies emphasizing water conservation, water efficiency, nutrient reductions, and riparian zone protection and restoration will be critical.

Let Habitat Work

Any national climate strategy must include land- and water-based solutions that harness the power of our natural systems. But, as you can see, these habitat improvements are already on our wish list as a conservation community.

It’s important to note that these actions will not only benefit fish and wildlife, enhance soil quality, and create cleaner water—they will also create jobs and strengthen rural economies. But there is no time to waste, whether we’re talking about implementing natural climate solutions, reversing habitat loss and wildlife species declines, or putting Americans back to work through conservation. We have to stop debating about resolving climate change and get to work on implementing these straightforward natural solutions. Let’s allow habitat to contribute all it can to the climate fight.

Ed Arnett is the Chief Scientist at Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

We should all applaud President Biden’s executive order calling for conservation of 30% of the U.S. land base by 2030. This bold “30×30” vision is firmly rooted in science, given that protected land is key to a healthy and secure future for all Americans. It provides pure drinking water, healthy food, clean air, habitat for wildlife, and places for people to reflect, recreate, hunt and fish. Conserved land also provides protection from natural disasters, such as floods and droughts, and absorbs and keeps carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere.

The president’s vision also recognizes that land conservation is not keeping pace with growing threats to our lands, waters, wildlife and ways of life. Every 30 seconds, the United States loses a football field of natural lands to roads, houses, pipelines and other development. Since 1970, North America has lost 3 billion birds — 29% of its avian population. Forty acres of farmland in the United States are lost to development every hour.

Given these facts, the audaciousness of the president’s conservation goal is right for this moment. And this “moon shot” for nature is necessary for more than just environmental reasons: Land — and the public’s desire to conserve it — provides one of the few opportunities to reduce political polarization and build social cohesion among a deeply splintered American populace. This was demonstrated most recently in the strong bipartisan consensus last Congress that led to the permanent reauthorization and full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

In particular, land conservation that takes place outside of the government sphere — through community-based, nonprofit organizations known as land trusts — provides a means for Americans of all backgrounds to save the places they need and love through personal initiative, landowner empowerment and charity. By finding common ground around these core American values and the lands we cherish, we can regain a sense of shared purpose and help heal a fractured nation. To put it in terms used by President Biden in his inaugural address, America’s farms and forests, its rivers and coasts and its mountains and meadows are “common objects of our love.” Conserving these places through citizen-led community efforts can bring us back together.

Most Americans are unaware that land trusts — powered by more than 200,000 volunteers and almost 5 million members of all political stripes — are working in almost every community in the United States to protect important lands. Likewise, few know that the nation’s land trust community has conserved approximately 60 million acres over the past 40 years — an area larger than all the land contained in America’s National Parks.

President Biden’s executive order tacitly acknowledged that to reach the 30×30 goal, we must rely on and bolster this community of nonprofits.

In short, we cannot achieve the 30×30 goal only by adding to the federal estate; we must empower private landowners to conserve their natural and working lands at a much greater pace and scale. Land trusts are uniquely qualified to make that happen and, importantly, they can do so in an inclusive and equitable way.

On behalf of the 1,000 land trusts my organization represents, I pledge that we will conserve at least another 60 million acres by the end of this decade. To do so, we need the help of the federal government. I call on President Biden and leaders in Congress to provide increased support to land trusts and the private landowners with whom they work. This includes protecting the integrity of the federal tax incentive for conservation easement donations; increasing mandatory funding for Farm Bill conservation programs that maintain viable working farms, ranches and forests; and creating mechanisms to compensate landowners when they increase the capacity of their lands to absorb and store carbon.

Through his executive order, President Biden adds credibility to the 30×30 goal, reveals the urgency we face in saving America’s undeveloped lands, and gives us a vision that can inspire and challenge us. Let us find a way to unite around this cause, garner the necessary resources both inside and outside government and get on with the essential task of conserving our natural heritage for the benefit of all Americans. The health of both our environment and our body politic depends on it.

This post was originally written for the Land Trust Alliance’s blog, The Dirt.

Andrew Bowman is president & CEO of the Land Trust Alliance.

California has long been a place that set trends.  From celebrities to surfing, the nation has long looked West to follow California’s lead.  And, of course, California has also been a global leader in attacking climate change.

Driven, in part, by record-breaking floods and fire seasons, the world’s fifth-largest economy has adopted numerous policies to curb emissions.  In 2006, California adopted its first economy-wide greenhouse gas reduction goal to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, which it has achieved.  That initial action has been followed by other policies, including setting a low carbon fuel standard, sustainable communities strategies, a renewable energy portfolio, and mobilizing state agencies in the effort to reach a carbon-neutral economy by 2045. 

California is also well-known for its greenhouse gas emissions trading program, which places a declining emissions cap on major-emitting facilities and allows these facilities to trade emissions permits and invest in a limited amount of emissions offsets to meet reductions goals. 

But what is California’s next climate action milestone?  Using California’s world-class nature to help address climate change. 

That’s why we just published Nature-based Climate Solutions: A Roadmap to Accelerate Action in California, to highlight key strategies that will help California achieve this outcome.

For California to successfully and effectively integrate nature-based strategies into its goal to be carbon neutral, we need to understand their potential contribution to greenhouse gas reductions across the state.  We also need to understand and identify the various policy pathways and incentives, beyond offsets, that could be pursued to support these reductions.  The Roadmap shows how we can accomplish just that. 

Pulling together the science analyses published by The Nature Conservancy and colleagues, we estimate the statewide greenhouse gas reduction potential of thirteen different nature-based climate strategies, ranging from agricultural management practices, to improved forest management and wetland restoration to fire risk reduction and urban reforestation.  We present this in a spatially explicit way that also identifies the opportunities to achieve additional benefits through these actions, including habitat for species, groundwater recharge, and benefits to underserved communities, among others. We then highlight case studies and a policy discussion by region across the state to highlight a number of different policies and incentives that could be scaled up across the state to accelerate nature-based climate strategies. 

While we acknowledge that increased funding for nature-based strategies is critical, we make it a point to highlight additional “non-monetary” strategies that are important to accelerate action, including:

• Improvements to permitting processes to restore wetlands and reduce fire risk,
• Land use and conservation policies that could be adjusted to support both avoided emissions from land conversion and reductions in transportation emissions, and
• Public-private partnerships between public agencies and utilities that could fund urban reforestation at larger scale and reduce the tree canopy gap in underserved communities                 

As discussions regarding how California can reach its carbon neutrality goals continue in the California legislature and Administration, we will continue to use this report to reframe the discussion on the role and importance of nature-based climate solutions, underscore their importance in achieving carbon neutrality, and highlight how we can get there.  While the focus of this report is on California, the issues we face here, and their relevance can extend to other jurisdictions in the United States and globally.     

Michelle Passero is the Director of California Climate Program for The Nature Conservancy.