A number of recent reports have underlined the increasingly critical role that natural climate solutions hold in helping the world stay on a path to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to Ceres, “we will not meet the goals of the Paris Agreement without protecting and restoring forests and other natural ecosystems and better managing agricultural land.” Yet while natural climate solutions could provide 7 to 14 billion tons of annual mitigation by 2030, current voluntary carbon markets produce less than .5% of that potential. This is because the current state of funding for natural climate solutions (NCS) lags far behind what is needed.
How can we infuse more climate finance into NCS projects to accelerate the pace and scale of the private market, while also working to improve the quality of these projects long-term?