What are Natural Climate Solutions?

Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) are Nature-based Solutions addressing climate change.

Nature-based Solutions are defined as actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being, ecosystem services and resilience and biodiversity benefits (UN 2022).

Nature-based, or NCS projects and programs generate carbon credits that can be bought and sold on the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM), allowing individuals and organizations to voluntarily counterbalance their carbon emissions and support environmental initiatives.

The voluntary carbon market plays a crucial role in addressing climate change, nature loss and socio-economic impacts by providing a platform for the trading of carbon credits.

What can NCS do?

The Role of NCS

NCS can provide around 30% of the emissions reductions needed to reach Paris Agreement temperature goals.

In addition, they provide many socio-economic & environmental benefits, such as the preservation and restoration of biodiversity, provision of ecosystem services and support sustainable livelihoods.

But despite their vast potential, NCS attract very little public and private investment.

The Role of Business

Businesses can finance natural climate solutions through the voluntary carbon market by purchasing high-quality NCS voluntary carbon credits to counterbalance their annual unabated emissions.

Businesses must demonstrate leadership by pursuing ambitious decarbonization targets and compensating year-on-year unabated emissions through high-quality NCS voluntary carbon credits.

This infographic is adapted from We need both natural and energy solutions to stabilize our climate: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.14612

RESOURCES

A Buyer’s Guide to Natural Climate Solutions Carbon Credits

  • This 2026 update provides practical guidance for companies purchasing high-quality NCS carbon credits in a rapidly evolving voluntary carbon market.

An Investor Guide to NCS Carbon Credits

  • This Guide provides insights to investors on how to identify high-integrity NCS projects, understand best practices for due diligence, and design and implement effective investment mechanisms – all with the goal of demystifying and de-risking NCS investments.

The Urgent need to finance NCS

  • To meet Paris Agreement goals, immediate action must be taken to halt and reverse nature loss and sustain and recover nature’s ability to sequester carbon.

C-Suite Executive Guide

  • Building company management level buy-in to usage of NCS in credible carbon strategies.

NCS Leaders

  • NCS Leaders are a series of video testimonials from businesses that have all demonstrated that their use of NCS raises their climate ambition, being used to go above and beyond the necessary internal decarbonization required at the level of each company in order to meet and exceed Paris Agreement-aligned goals.

Busting the myths around nature-based solutions

  • What is getting in the way of government and corporate action on Nature-based Solutions? New research by Nature4Climate looks to bust the most-frequently cited myths around NbS.

Guidance on the Voluntary Use of NCS Credits

  • Technical guidance developed by a WRI working group focused on nature-based solutions and markets and represents the Institute’s latest collective thinking on the voluntary use of NBS carbon credits.

Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets

  • A Playbook for Corporate Action. Written by WEF and supported by Bain & Co., this report provides a practical guide to navigating VCM, and calls for private, public and civil society players to take the necessary steps to unlock the full potential of VCM to accelerate climate action.

Financing NCS: Webinar

  • Part of the 24hr NCS Summit, this session discussed how the different levels of risks associated with the different stages of an NCS project attract different types of investors, stressing the importance of price discovery and having more transparency in the transactions to unlock more finance for future NCS projects.

Natural Climate Solutions 101

Part of the 24hr NCS Summit, this recording gives an overview of what are NCS, and the role of project developers, with some great tips for buyers on what to ask project developers during the procurement process.

This session was held during the 24hr NCS Summit. For a full list of all the sessions from this even, and their recordings, click here.

Alphabet Soup

The world of NCS and the VCM can sometimes seem like a jumble of alphabet soup.

Watch this quick video to get your head around all the acronyms.

The Principles of Natural Climate Solutions

Principle 1:

Nature-based

Natural climate solutions are nature-based. Natural climate solutions result from the human stewardship of ecosystems. They do not move ecosystems further from their natural state.

Principle 2:

Sustainable

Natural climate solutions are sustainable. They sustain biodiversity, food production, fiber and wood production, and climate adaptation services.

Principle 3:

Additional

NCS are additional. They provide additional climate mitigation that would not happen without intervention. They provide durable mitigation, and they are not used to compensate for emissions that need to be avoided to avoid climate crisis.

Principle 4:

Measurable

Natural climate solutions are measurable. They must quantify their climate benefit as consistently and completely as possible. NCS accounting is conservative and avoids double counting. NCS with uncertainty ranges greater than the estimated climate mitigation should be flagged as emerging.

Principle 5:

Equitable

NCS are equitable. They respect human rights, and respect Indigenous self-determination.

Source: Ellis, P.W., Page, A.M., Wood, S. et al. The principles of natural climate solutions. Nat Commun 15, 547 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44425-2