How much can — or should — humanity rely on nature to help solve the climate crisis?
It’s a debate that readers of this news site know well.
In 2024, two Conservation International scientists responded to a study that was dismissive of the role of forests in absorbing climate-warming carbon from the atmosphere. That study’s authors favored engineered solutions that, they contend, can permanently remove carbon pollution by using nascent technologies to capture and store it underground.
The problem is that technological solutions are decades away from being ready at the scale needed. Trees, on the other hand, are immediately scalable, but their potential “impermanence” — one way or another, all trees eventually die — renders them unreliable for fixing humanity’s climate problem, critics say.
Now, a group of experts from academia, corporations and civil society say: We need both. In a paper published last week in the journal Climate Policy, the authors say that pitting the two carbon-removal approaches against each other will only slow progress in solving perhaps humanity’s most urgent environmental challenge.
Conservation News spoke with Jason Funk, a climate expert at Conservation International and a co-author of the article, to talk about what it means and why the issue of “permanence” remains so hotly contested.
Conservation News: What's the key message of this paper?
Jason Funk: This paper is in many ways a response to the narrative that says if these carbon removals aren't permanent, then they're useless. We authors agreed that this is not really the case. This paper is responding to what we feel is an inaccurate or misguided narrative that says the only removals that matter are the ones that last forever, or at least a thousand years.
For non-experts: ‘Permanence’ refers to how long the carbon stays locked in the tree. Eventually, all trees die some way or another, so there is some discord over what standard of permanence should be used.
JF: Exactly.
But true “permanence” is not a meaningful standard. Instead, we need to think about the durability of these solutions, which is a spectrum: It's not just yes or no, is it permanent or not? Rather, the question is: Is this removal going to last long enough to solve the problem we have? And that's a much different question.
And in fact, permanence is a standard you can never meet, right? None of us are going to be around forever; we would need somebody a thousand years from now to tell us if it had worked, if the carbon was still there or not. And that's just not a thing we can do. So it was kind of a nonsensical way to frame it in the first place.
Where did this standard come from?
JF: Some of this talk is from people who have developed technologies to enable geologic sequestration (storing carbon underground), so it seems they are trying to exclude others from the solution space that they're trying to occupy. That's never been our attitude — at Conservation International, we say, “New solutions? Great! We need them all.”
A pivotal moment in this conversation happened a few years ago now, in a New York Times op-ed that said, in so many words, “You can't rely on forest-based carbon reductions; the trees can burn up — so invest in my sequestration technology instead.” The argument seemed a bit self-serving to me at the time, but we weren’t prepared to push back on it, because up until that point the “Nature” and “Tech” crowds had mostly been working in harmony.
In this paper, we finally got around to having a robust response to that piece, with a lot of knowledgeable scientists across the nature and tech fields in agreement about what we were saying. And what we're saying is, “permanence” is the wrong way to think about it.
Explain.
JF: We're saying, let's look right now at the risks (of harmful climate change impacts) and how they can be managed, and decide what we should be doing right now. What's worth investing in now as a solution? And let’s not base the decision on some far-in-the-future test that we can never meet.
We also talk in the paper about complementarities — if you're looking at climate change as a problem that requires a portfolio of solutions, then it really makes sense to do both. Essentially: Let's do the nature stuff now, and if some of it ends up being non-permanent and being reversed later, then even the temporary benefit has bought us some time to develop the tech solutions, which right now are operating on a very small scale or still in development. We're saying very clearly: We're not opposed to those technologies. Sure, people should invest in that — but let's have a balanced approach.
So you can ‘deploy’ nature now on an immediately huge scale while you start figuring out this technology?
JF: It still takes time to deploy “nature-based solutions,” but we know how to do them, and the technology is off-the-shelf. And on the nature side, it’s fair to say there's some acknowledgement that the way we've been managing risks in the voluntary carbon market so far were blunt instruments, maybe not the best fit for the job. We learned lessons from the early approaches, and now we're in a position of having a lot more information we can use to develop more sophisticated tools.
That’s exciting, and some people are piloting new approaches and building business models around them. For instance, there are carbon insurance companies now, in the way that works similarly to how we insure cars and houses and things like that. These are insurable risks, as long as you understand the risk profile of these different technologies or different activities and how they apply to decisions about planting trees today (as an example).
And guess what? The timber industry has already been thinking about the risks to their trees for decades and decades. They know how risk management works for forests. And they know how to manage risk from a financial perspective. Carbon removal is the same thing — except that you're not cutting down the trees. You want them to stay! So there’s a lot of relevant knowledge out there that we just haven't fully tapped into yet.
These conversations about permanence, about risk, about nature-vs.-technology — they’ve been going on for years. How does the market deal with them?
JF: I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately. Because carbon is still a relatively “young” market, you’ve had the opportunity for people to take advantage of others’ ignorance about the risks. It sounds plausible to say, “That forest burned up over there, so therefore all forest carbon is at risk.” But in reality, there's a ton of data that says, “No, that's not really the case — actually, forest carbon stocks are increasing.” True, there are fluctuations over time. This is the reason why scale is the solution to this — you can insure against individual risks when you pool risk together.
I’m not trying to downplay the risks. Certainly, there are instances where a forest burned up or was blown down or was converted to agriculture. The point we are making in the paper is that we can address and manage those risks, in the way we do in other, more mature markets.
Let me use a farming metaphor. I've got farmers in my family, and I know that their livelihoods are at risk from weather-related events all the time. But the idea that we can't depend on farming because of the risks — well, that's disproven every day by the fact that almost all of us eat, we have milk in our fridge, we have bread in our cabinets. We rely on a production system that has risk embedded in it, but it's reliable enough that it keeps us fed and healthy — in part because it has pooled that risk.
It’s not a perfect system, and we still have food security challenges to resolve. But by and large, the system works well for most of us. No one thinks, “I'm not going to be able to get food anymore because of this rainstorm or the flood or that fire over there.” We've put systems in place to help farmers — and the food system — manage those risks. We can do the same for carbon.
How do things look in your world now compared with where they were five years ago?
JF: Compared to five years ago, I definitely think that private-sector momentum is not going to go away, and that the companies of the world, independent of the regulations that they face, are realizing the trend of the world is that we have to hit net zero by 2050. And the ones who want to be part of that future economy are making the changes to prepare for that trend — the majority of them seem to have embraced the idea that there's no going back.
The second thing is that we see that so many countries are really doing effective things for their forests. Many developing countries are doing things that you wouldn't necessarily expect. They have a choice, right? They know they can cut down the forest and put soybeans in and sell into a pre-existing market. Or they can choose to keep these trees standing instead and get a smaller return. And in so many cases, they take the smaller return and keep the trees standing — and it's revealing to the rest of us that they care so much about their forests. Clearly there's an inherent value in these resources that they want to protect, beyond the economic value today. They see it as part of their national identity, part of their national value that goes beyond simply liquidating these assets and turning them into dollars. So that's been a profound thing for me to witness and understand.
Of course, protecting forests is not always done in a way that can't be reversed. There's political risk as administrations change. We've seen some of that in the countries where Conservation International works. But I've been pleasantly surprised in many cases about how far countries are willing to go. They put a lot of effort into building out their policies and developing their own capacities. And that gives me hope.
Bruno Vander Velde is the managing director of storytelling at Conservation International. Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updates. Also, please consider supporting our critical work.
