The Natural Climate Solutions Initiative

Conservation International is partnering with Procter & Gamble (P&G) to help the consumer goods company meet its commitment to natural climate solutions for delivering carbon, community and biodiversity benefits. These projects aim to protect, improve and restore forests and other ecosystems essential to people and wildlife.

One of these projects is in the Philippine province of Palawan. The Philippines is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, providing habitat to a variety of species found nowhere else on the planet. One of the country’s most vital biodiversity areas is the 120,457-hectare Mount Mantalingahan Protected Landscape, located near the southern tip of the island of Palawan. The Mantalingahan Landscape is a vital habitat for more than 1,000 plant and animal species — 10 percent of which are threatened, including the Palawan pangolin and the Philippine cockatoo. The landscape is also the home to over 12,000 Indigenous people, many of whom rely directly on nature for their livelihoods and are among the world’s most climate vulnerable communities.

Despite its protected status, the Mantalingahan Landscape continues to be threatened by deforestation and forest degradation. In the past two decades, its upland and mangrove forests have decreased by more than 20 percent due to illegal forest clearing. Our collaboration with P&G aims to protect this environment by helping secure local community land rights and increasing patrolling. These efforts also support building the local communities’ resilience by improving small-holder farming practices and developing community-based enterprises based on non-timber forest products.

MANTALINGAHAN LANDSCAPE: A CRITICAL ECOSYSTEM

The five-year Mantalingahan Landscape Conservation Project, launched in 2020, aims to accelerate and improve the restoration and protection of 120,000 hectares of the landscape, so that these ecosystems can continue to support communities while contributing to global emissions reductions goals through forest and mangrove conservation. The project directly engages Indigenous and local communities to strengthen their governance capacity to support and sustain community-based conservation. A comprehensive carbon investment plan is under way based on the emissions reductions and removals associated with the project. The project will also include the full partnership of local communities and landholders.

Retaining more than half of its original forest cover, the Mantalingahan Landscape is:

THE CHALLENGE

While the Mantalingahan Landscape continues to support livelihoods, most Indigenous peoples within the landscape remain below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples and local communities contribute little to global greenhouse gas emissions and yet already are suffering the worst impacts of climate change. Increasingly intense natural disasters in the Philippines, such as droughts and floods, coupled with an unpredictable monsoon season have caused considerable declines in harvests of rice and other crops, threatening food security and livelihoods.

OUR ROLE

The project is built upon groundbreaking research published in 2022 and led by Conservation International that shows that some key geographies are so extraordinarily carbon-rich that they must be protected if humanity is to avoid catastrophic climate change. In other words, we have identified the places on the planet that we must protect to avoid climate catastrophe.

For this partnership with P&G, Conservation International is assisting in implementation. In 2022, we: