Apr 22, 2022
With Earth Day rapidly approaching, and human actions universally acknowledged as having severely altered the world’s ecosystems, the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) reveals why now is the right time for its Nature People and Climate program.
The science is undisputed - climate change presents a profound threat to our global ecosystems and the critical services that this natural capital generates for people and planet.
The unsustainable ways in which we manage our natural resources, significantly expands the threat to our terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments, and the intricate web of life supported by all these habitats. The recent IPCC 2022 Climate Change 2022 – Mitigation for Climate Change report described human activities in the Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sectors as accounting for between 13-21% of the world’s anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the period 2010-2019.
The report also offered a significant glimmer of hope.
It recognized that these areas of human activity can provide large-scale emissions reductions and also remove and store carbon dioxide at scale, calling for the rapid deployment of mitigation measures inside the AFOLU sectors - describing them as essential to staying within the limits of our remaining carbon budget to maintain a 1.5◦C pathway, and ‘uniquely positioned’ to deliver positive increases to e.g., biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, air and water quality, soil productivity, food security and human wellbeing.
It was hopes like these that first inspired 20 million Americans (10% of the entire population at that time) to take to the streets on the very first Earth Day (April 22nd, 1970) to protest the toxic effects of unrestricted industrialization on nature, people, and planet.
52 years later, Earth Day is a global movement which mobilizes a billion voices for transformative climate action as the clamour for a clean environment becomes ever more pressing, and destructive climate change impacts grow depressingly more familiar. Clearly, the motivations driving the original pioneers of the Earth Day movement overlap with CIF’s aspirations in the present day…
The shift towards sustainable management of our natural resources needs to be accelerated – the IPCC 2022 report stated that mitigation measures in the AFOLU sectors have been well understood for decades but deployment remains slow. There’s an equally urgent need to address competing land uses to mitigate for climate risks, while the impetus to ensure a just transition to benefit the most vulnerable people needs to be intensified.
It’s no coincidence then, that CIF’s latest nature initiative is designed with the above aims in mind…
Three reasons why the Nature, People and Climate program will help deliver the potential of AFOLU mitigation measures
The Nature People and Climate program…
- Promotes the participation of indigenous peoples through a unique feature – a direct financing initiative called the Dedicated Grant Mechanism that was successfully piloted within the CIF Forest Investment Program. This aims to directly finance indigenous peoples to lead in driving climate change solutions, while harnessing their experience and capacities, learned at the coal face of climate change, into climate action. It was recently shown that land managed by indigenous groups sequester more than twice the carbon than land that is not managed by them
- Recognizes the interdependency between land use, climate change and people by managing these complex relationships and balancing the trade-offs between them. By working in an integrated fashion with key regional and local actors across a diversity of land uses, the program aims to deliver multiple benefits which include biodiversity conservation, GHG emissions mitigation, climate resilience strengthening and poverty reduction
- Provides a scaled up, wide ranging and holistic support package to protect, restore and connect a diversity of ecosystems across multiple landscapes. The scope of support ranges from diagnostics, to planning, to financing at scale that is underpinned by multilateral development bank partners. It collaborates with the beneficiary countries to assess, and then address, their climate risk needs and so accelerate transformative policy and investments actions
As Earth Day approaches its 52nd birthday and, once again, a broad coalition of global climate stakeholders and activists unite around the common theme of preserving our wildlife, our ecosystems and humanity itself, it’s clear that the case for financing a rapid shift to sustainable management of our natural capital is compelling. The future of our species, and all life on Earth depends upon it.
