How would you change over half of the world’s croplands to better support carbon removal? Or dedicate a land area several times the size of Tasmania to renewable energy on Australia’s mainland?

Questions like these exemplify the scale and scope of land use change that might be needed to support climate goals.

Transforming how land is used and managed for agriculture, forestry, wetlands and other ecosystems  is essential for meeting climate targets. 

However, changes in one aspect of our land use system may benefit or negatively affect other parts because land is a finite resource.

It is therefore essential that we prioritise action on solutions that can meet multiple sustainability goals and minimise trade-offs.  

Nature-based solutions have been proposed as a set of integrative approaches that can provide the means to simultaneously address climate change, halt and reverse biodiversity loss whilst meeting the needs of a growing global human population.

But what are nature-based solutions and to what extent can they help us address these interlinked crises? 

Nature-based solutions for climate mitigation include three main types of actions to increase carbon storage, avoid greenhouse gas emissions, or both

  1. protecting natural ecosystems from loss and degradation
  2. restoring ecosystems that have been degraded, and 
  3. managing more sustainably agricultural and forestry lands. 

A common estimate is that nature-based solutions can provide over one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed up to 2030 to stabilise warming to below two degrees Celsius (°C).

However, many assumptions and implications need to be considered if this potential is to be realised.

First, there are gaps in both knowledge and financing.

Knowledge about what is feasible – technically, socially and economically, not least because climate change itself increasingly impacts nature’s ability to store carbon.

Public and private financing because investments in nature will need to dramatically increase to enable this potential – at least fourfold by 2050 to close a US$4.1 trillion financing gap

Second, interconnected with these gaps, there is a fundamental ‘land gap’.

This is the difference between what is expected from the land sector for carbon removals and how much land can realistically be made available to do so. 

Leading international mitigation pathways to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C involve ‘very significant changes in current land-use trajectories’.

However, very few countries have developed strategies to bring about the land-use change required to support such trajectories.

Furthermore, many countries are relying on unrealistic amounts of land-based carbon removal to meet their climate pledges.

The recent Land Gap Report estimates that globally, the total area of land needed to meet projected biological carbon removal in national climate pledges is almost 1.2 billion hectares.

This is a significant portion of all of the land across the globe that is currently used for agriculture. 

This is an issue globally and in Australia.

How much nature-based solutions can be relied on has important implications for the speed and depth of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions needed across all sectors. 

In order for nature-based solutions to be taken to scale, we must understand how this can take place without compromising biodiversity, food security or other sustainable development goals.

This includes determining how best to address trade-offs and promote co-benefits in ways that respect and involve traditional custodians, landholders, and regional communities.

Bridging the gap with Land Use Futures 

Climateworks is tackling the challenge on several fronts. 

We are supporting action on nature-based solutions and associated land use issues by identifying what solutions exist, what changes are needed and how we can best reconcile multiple demands on land that a transition to net zero necessitates. 

Over the last few years we have convened stakeholders to create a shared vision for what sustainable land use means for Australia. 

Last year, we defined elements of this vision as scaled-down planetary boundaries in our Living within limits report

Illustrated map of Australia showing various land use types.
Co-created graphic with key Land Use Futures stakeholders in September 2020. Artist: Zev Landes

We are also improving land use modelling to support decision making by supporting the upgrade of the Land Use Tradeoff Model or LUTO.

This tool can make detailed projections representing how Australia’s landscape could change in the future and show the potential costs, benefits and interactions of different solutions for climate and nature goals. 

In the next couple of months we will share our insights on how particular solutions can support positive climate and nature outcomes, including a review of the role of regenerative agriculture and the environmental impacts of increasing demand for food and fibre in Australia and abroad. 

Together these analyses explore implications of both how our land is managed, and what it is used for, and what drivers can impact land use decision-making. 

Measuring natural capital to protect it

Ensuring that nature’s services are captured, measured and valued, is an important complement to this work.

Climateworks’ Natural Capital Investment Initiative (NCII) is creating tools and resources to support banks, land managers and food retailers to consistently measure the natural capital in their customer portfolios and supply chains.

Lessons from this could provide the impetus for increased public and private investment in nature-based solutions at a farm scale. 

These programs aim to identify how decision-makers in Australia can support the pursuit of a 1.5°C aligned pathway in the land use sector.

To do so, we also need to build a deeper understanding of why land use really matters when it comes to meeting our climate and nature goals.