This report, the Exponential Roadmap for Natural Climate Solutions, is a roadmap for rapidly accelerating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and boosting natural carbon sinks through better stewardship of our natural and working landscapes. It’s a first step towards charting the path and milestones that the world needs to follow to accelerate nature’s contributions to climate mitigation in line with the Carbon Law for Nature – the first key innovation in this Roadmap.
The second key innovation is that the routes to action are organized around changes in the ways people interact with land, rather than changes in the amount of carbon in different types of land cover. This involves a necessary focus on people living and working on the land, primarily farmers, ranchers, foresters, Indigenous people and local communities, and public land managers. The ability of these groups to steward land is supported by other groups of people who we call enabling actors: policymakers, the finance sector, businesses, and social movements.
This Roadmap is organized around the actions that connect these two groups of actors, resulting in changes on the ground – the Action Tracks. Action Tracks focus on the interventions in the stewardship of the world’s natural and working lands that will generate the greatest climate impact and are also the most likely to scale. Each of the eight Tracks, which are quantified in detail, focuses on a crucial part of the puzzle.
The third key innovation developed in this Roadmap is a series of mitigation trajectories resulting from implementation of the Action Tracks. These trajectories show the pace of change required to meet the Carbon Law for Nature – and are in line with the science regarding the hierarchy of natural climate solutions.
Taken together, the eight Action Tracks deliver the necessary outcomes: protect natural systems that are most at risk from agricultural expansion and other threats, rapidly scale climate-smart management to shift working lands from an emissions source to a net carbon sink, and begin to restore natural ecosystems and contribute to the emergence of a new global restoration sector.