What we’re reading
Book > The Case for Nature: Pioneering Solutions for the Other Planetary Crisis
By Siddarth Shrikanth (May 2023)
We are on the brink of catastrophe and cutting emissions alone won't be enough. There is a second crisis happening in our ecosystems. To tackle it, we should recognise that the natural world is not only priceless, but has measurable economic value. Restoring biodiversity aided by technological and financial innovation will unlock environmental protections and economic benefits.
The Case for Nature sets out with powerful clarity how protecting nature is both the right thing to do, and in our economic interests; how, taking a cue from a range of indigenous worldviews, nature must be woven into our modern societies, not set apart. Siddarth Shrikanth introduces the pioneers of the nature-positive revolution, and gives us the tools to understand how we can work with, not against, our living planet.
Report > The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review
Partha Dasgupta (February 2021)
The Dasgupta Review is an independent, global review on the Economics of Biodiversity led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta (Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge). The Review was commissioned in 2019 by HM Treasury and has been supported by an Advisory Panel drawn from public policy, science, economics, finance and business.
The Review calls for changes in how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world. Grounded in a deep understanding of ecosystem processes and how they are affected by economic activity, the new framework presented by the Review sets out how we should account for Nature in economics and decision-making.
Book > Why Forests? Why Now?: The Science, Economics, and Politics of Tropical Forests and Climate Change
By Frances Seymour and Jonah Busch
Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time—averting climate change and promoting development. Despite their importance, tropical forests and their ecosystems are being destroyed at a high and even increasing rate in most forest-rich countries. The good news is that the science, economics, and politics are aligned to support a major international effort over the next five years to reverse tropical deforestation.
Why Forests? Why Now? synthesizes the latest evidence on the importance of tropical forests in a way that is accessible to anyone interested in climate change and development and to readers already familiar with the problem of deforestation. It makes the case to decision-makers in rich countries that rewarding developing countries for protecting their forests is urgent, affordable, and achievable.
Book > The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history
By Elizabeth Kolbert
Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, The New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
Book > Nature’s Fortune: How business and society thrive by investing in nature
By Mark Tercek and Jonathan Adams
In Nature's Fortune, Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy and former investment banker, and science writer Jonathan Adams argue that nature is not only the foundation of human well-being, but also the smartest commercial investment any business or government can make. The forests, floodplains, and oyster reefs often seen simply as raw materials or as obstacles to be cleared in the name of progress are, in fact as important to our future prosperity as technology or law or business innovation.
Who invests in nature, and why? What rates of return can it produce? When is protecting nature a good investment? With stories from the South Pacific to the California coast, from the Andes to the Gulf of Mexico and even to New York City, Nature's Fortune shows how viewing nature as green infrastructure allows for breakthroughs not only in conservation -- protecting water supplies; enhancing the health of fisheries; making cities more sustainable, livable and safe; and dealing with unavoidable climate change -- but in economic progress, as well. Organizations obviously depend on the environment for key resources -- water, trees, and land. But they can also reap substantial commercial benefits in the form of risk mitigation, cost reduction, new investment opportunities, and the protection of assets. Once leaders learn how to account for nature in financial terms, they can incorporate that value into the organization's decisions and activities, just as habitually as they consider cost, revenue, and ROI.
Book > Valuing Nature: A handbook for impact investing
By William Ginn
As the world faces unprecedented challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss, the resources needed far outstrip the capabilities of nonprofits and even governments. Yet there are seeds of hope—and much of that hope comes from the efforts of the private sector. Impact investing is rapidly becoming an essential tool, alongside philanthropy and government funding, in tackling these major problems. Valuing Nature presents a new set of nature-based investment areas to help conservationists and investors work together.
NatureVest founder William Ginn outlines the emerging private sector investing opportunities in natural assets such as green infrastructure, forests, soils, and fisheries. The first part of Valuing Nature examines the scope of nature-based impact investing while also presenting a practical overview of its limitations and the challenges facing the private sector. The second part of the book offers tools for investors and organizations to consider as they develop their own projects and tips on how nonprofits can successfully navigate this new space. Case studies from around the world demonstrate how we can use private capital to achieve more sustainable uses of our natural resources without the unintended consequences plaguing so many of our current efforts.
Valuing Nature provides a roadmap for conservation professionals, nonprofit managers, and impact investors seeking to use market-based strategies to improve the management of natural systems.
Book > The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, “500-year” storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually.
This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await—food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.
Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.
Article > Carbonplan Research Reports
A collection of datasets, models, explainers, and commentary on carbon removal and climate solutions.
Climate-driven Risks to Forest Carbon
Report > CDR Primer
Edited by Jennifer Wilcox, Ben Kolosz and Jeremy Freeman (summary from Preface)
A new resource on the fundamentals of carbon dioxide removal and its role in addressing the climate crisis:
To address the climate crisis, dramatic emissions reduction must be deployed in concert with CDR. CDR encompasses myriad techniques and technologies: direct air capture, carbon storage and sequestration in natural basins, bioenergy with carbon capture, reforestation, carbon-friendly soil management practices, ocean enhancement, and many more. Each method has different rates of CO2 uptake, land requirements, energy demands, storage permanence, and cost.
This primer provides the context and background on CDR you need to begin applying yourself to the climate crisis. Written by dozens of authors, it offers a dialogue, rather than a rigid consensus, with open questions and insight into the needs of large-scale carbon dioxide removal.
Article > Protecting Irrecoverable Carbon in Earth’s Ecosystems
Allie Goldstein, et al. (March 2020)
Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires rapid decarbonization and improved ecosystem stewardship. To achieve the latter, ecosystems should be prioritized by responsiveness to direct, localized action and the magnitude and recoverability of their carbon stores. Here, we show that a range of ecosystems contain ‘irrecoverable carbon’ that is vulnerable to release upon land use conversion and, once lost, is not recoverable on timescales relevant to avoiding dangerous climate impacts. Globally, ecosystems highly affected by human land-use decisions contain at least 260 Gt of irrecoverable carbon, with particularly high densities in peatlands, mangroves, old-growth forests and marshes. To achieve climate goals, we must safeguard these irrecoverable carbon pools through an expanded set of policy and finance strategies.
Report > Voluntary Carbon and the Post-Pandemic Recovery: State of Voluntary Carbon Markets Report
Every year since 2006, Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace initiative has tracked, through its globally-recognized survey, what would otherwise be an opaque voluntary carbon market. This work has served as a consistent and comprehensive price discovery mechanism, while at the same time shedding light on the active project developers and intermediaries, thus answering fundamental questions about market dynamics, supply, and demand.
Companies worldwide are taking steps to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from their operations, but most find it’s either technologically impossible to eliminate all emissions immediately or that the costs of doing so are prohibitively high. In order to deliver deep and cost-effective reductions now, many companies have pledged to become carbon-neutral in the near term by financing emission-reductions elsewhere ̶or, in climate parlance, “offsetting” any emissions they can’t yet eliminate. As a result, we are seeing near-record volumes being transacted in the voluntary carbon markets, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Insights:
Corporate carbon-neutral pledges fueled a record transaction volume of at least 104 MtCO2e in 2019, which is an increase of 6 percent over 2018. Figures may be adjusted with data from new respondents.
Volume has been surprisingly strong in 2020. Anecdotal evidence based on interviews with market participants indicates it may even exceed that of 2019, despite the COVID19 pandemic. Broader pledges have compensated for the loss of volume from the aviation and tourism sectors.
Average offset prices remained flat in 2019, but with wide variance by type. Prices for offsets associated with Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) and Natural Climate Solutions (NCS), for example, increased ~30 percent, while prices for offsets from renewable energy decreased 16 percent.
Price and volume moved in opposite directions for these leading offset types. Agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) volume dropped 28 percent and renewable energy volume surged by 78 percent.
Despite the lower volume, the market value of AFOLU offsets was more than twice that of Renewable Energy, and demand for offsets associated with forest management in developing countries (i.e., REDD+) remains especially strong.