Natural climate solutions: the business perspective

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the Nature4Climate (N4C) coalition launched “Natural climate solutions: the business perspective”, a guide to natural climate solutions for the private sector.

The report, developed by WBCSD member companies and international NGOs active in this area, highlights the role that nature can play in tackling our greatest challenge: climate change. The key natural approaches described are protecting, restoring and sustainably managing forests, grasslands, agricultural land, and wetlands. Natural climate solutions: the business perspective explains the current state of these solutions, outlines the risks and opportunities for businesses, and proposes investment principles for the private sector.

Natural climate solutions address many of the critical issues we face today by helping nature do what it’s been doing for millions of years: sequester and store carbon. Studies have shown that they could provide around 30% of the emissions reductions needed to meet the Paris Agreement targets for 2030.

Importantly, natural climate solutions also present a range of co-benefits. While sequestering carbon, they can also increase climate resilience and food security, benefit biodiversity and improve rural livelihoods and economic development (among other positive impacts).

The need for these solutions is clear – but we lack the finance and policies needed to enable nature to deliver them. In fact, The Nature Conservancy estimates that only 3% of climate finance is used in this way, and only a handful of regions and countries have policies in place that direct private sector finance to natural climate solutions at scale. This, however, is changing; the narrative outlines the trends in both private sector engagement and policy development around the world and presents a set of investment principles that represent good practice in investing in natural climate solutions projects.