In 2019, my scientific research was nearly brought to an early end when my team and I published the bombastic statement that natural forest restoration was the “best climate change solution” available in a paper for the peer-reviewed journal Science.
I remember a colleague from the World Wildlife Fund advising me that this message represented career suicide. He argued that people would be furious because reducing greenhouse gas emissions was the most urgent priority. The revival of nature might help with 30% of our carbon drawdown needs, but you cannot stop rising temperatures without cutting emissions.
I agreed both then and now. However, I explained that when we referred to the “best” solution, we didn’t simply mean the one with the largest impact in terms of C02; we meant the best option for improving the livelihoods and wellbeing of people, too. And that, as we shall see, plays a crucial role in magnifying the beneficial effect.
Many people believe the scale of the climate challenge calls for immense technological innovation, geoengineering, or the transformation of our economy. But with these solutions there are often painful trade-offs. Almost every technological or geoengineering fix you can imagine comes at the expense of something else.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is one example. Creating clouds of reflective particles could block the sun and cool the land below. But alterations in sunlight and rainfall patterns could disrupt the growth of the crops we depend on for food. Similarly, direct air carbon capture has incredible potential to remove C02, but the huge financial and energy costs currently stand in the way of deploying it at the scale we need.
There is one set of solutions, however, that present no trade-off at all when they are done right. The restoration of natural habitats like forests is an exception in our climate toolkit because it draws on the same network of connections that allowed life to flourish in the first place.
The resilience of the natural world comes from ancient, underappreciated forces known as feedback loops. A positive feedback loop occurs when the outcome of a process has an effect that amplifies the process itself. You can see these patterns all the time in different aspects of life: for example whenever your anxiety about sleeping makes it harder to drift off.
Around 3.8bn to 4.2bn years ago, feedback loops allowed life to spread on an otherwise toxic and uninhabitable planet: Earth. As life gained a foothold, it began to transform the environment, making it hospitable to more life. Species emerged that generated opportunities for even more species. This self-reinforcing process created the Eden that allowed our own species to thrive, as well as providing every ounce of food, oxygen, timber, medicine and fuel we have ever needed.
But as we are all aware, the success of our species has initiated new feedback loops. The exploitation of natural resources by human beings has allowed population growth that has driven even more exploitation, which has warmed the planet, causing carbon to be released from the soil, driving more warming. As forests dry out, they are able to store less moisture, which causes more drying. Many loops such as this are now in motion, threatening to tip our planet into an entirely new state.
But just as feedback loops can cause damage, they can be harnessed as a pathway to recovery. They are not objectively good or bad: they are simply agents of change. If we can work with nature’s feedback loops rather than distorting them, we can reap the benefits of their self-sustaining momentum.
In Argentina’s Iberá national park, you can see a stunning example of runaway revival. After decades of degradation, the reintroduction of jaguars has reduced bloated herds of grazing herbivores, allowing wetland plants to recover. The plants’ roots trap moisture in the soil, and their branches provide a habitat for species that make this one of the most spectacular wetlands – and carbon sinks – on the planet. After just a few years, caimans now bask on the banks, macaws flash scarlet across the sky and giant otters patrol the waterways.
Of course, nature-based solutions are not always so successful. Companies have created vast carbon farms via monocultural tree planting, destroying native species in the process. The drying of peatlands to reduce methane production leads to the release of huge amounts of CO2. Nature’s power lies in its complexity, so attempting to simplify or reengineer the system often backfires.
The risks and trade-offs tend to disappear, though, when you get one vital part of the equation right. Time and again, when the revival of local biodiversity improves the livelihoods and wellbeing of local people, change becomes truly sustainable. Whenever people are intrinsically motivated to protect the environment around them, they become an integrated part of a natural feedback loop that can quickly gather momentum.
In the Iberá wetlands example, ecotourism became the engine of a new “restoration economy” employing rangers, chefs, hosts, wildlife trackers and guides. There are hundreds of such examples around the world: in Saseri, northern India, strategic soil management and tree restoration is trapping water to improve the yields of more than 1,200 farmers. A thousand kilometres to the south-west, in Gujarat, Indigenous women are restoring mangroves to protect 12 coastal villages from erosion while simultaneously improving the productivity of fisheries, crops and livestock.
What these and countless other projects illustrate is that we do not need remarkable innovation or great sacrifice to move things forward. We just need to allow a tiny fraction of our collective attention and wealth (perhaps less than 1% of global GDP) to flow towards these rural land stewards, supporting their ongoing efforts. Cumulatively, they result in hundreds of millions of tons of C02 captured – but that is only the beginning of their potential impact.
The more degraded nature becomes, the more desperately we need it. When nature starts to bounce back, it doesn’t only provide livelihoods, food security and carbon storage; it revives the hope, joy and inspiration that our species so desperately needs at this critical moment in time. Though they might seem beside the point, these emotional reactions are the lifeblood of nature restoration, with the potential to generate their own feedback loops, far into the future.
Prof Thomas Crowther is an ecologist and author of Nature’s Echo (Torva). He is Founder of Restor.eco, a non-profit platform for nature restoration sites
Further reading
Just Earth: How a Fairer World Will Save the Planet by Tony Juniper (Bloomsbury, £10.99)
A Climate of Truth by Mike Berners-Lee (Cambridge University Press, £14.99)
Wilding by Isabella Tree (Picador, £10.99)
