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Introduction
Identifying, quantifying, and overcoming feasibility constraints on natural climate solutions
Current institution
Publications
Publications (79)
Urban trees reduce respirable particulate matter (PM 10) concentrations and maximum daytime summer temperatures. While most cities are losing tree cover, some are considering ambitious planting efforts. Maximizing PM 10 and heat mitigation for people from such efforts requires cost-effective targeting. We adapt published methods to estimate the imp...
Limiting climate warming to <2°C requires increased mitigation efforts, including land stewardship, whose potential in the United States is poorly understood. We quantified the potential of natural climate solutions (NCS)—21 conservation, restoration, and improved land management interventions on natural and agricultural lands—to increase carbon st...
Watershed management may have widespread potential to cost-effectively deliver hydrologic services. Mobilizing the needed investments requires credible assessments of how watershed conservation compares to conventional solutions on cost and effectiveness, utilizing an integrated analytical framework that links the bio-, litho-, hydro- and economic...
High air temperatures are a public health threat, causing 1300 deaths annually in the United States (US) along with heat-related morbidity and increased electricity consumption for air-conditioning (AC). Increasing tree canopy cover has been proposed as one way to reduce urban air temperatures. Here, we assemble tree cover and developed land-cover...
Achieving the 1.5–2.0 °C temperature targets of the Paris climate agreement requires not only reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but also increasing removals of GHGs from the atmosphere [1,2]. Reforestation is a potentially large-scale method for removing CO2 and storing it in the biomass and soils of ecosystems [3,4,5,6,7,8], yet its co...
Natural climate solutions (NCS) play a critical role in climate change mitigation. NCS can generate win–win co-benefits for biodiversity and human well-being, but they can also involve trade-offs (co-impacts). However, the massive evidence base on NCS co-benefits and possible trade-offs is poorly understood. We employ large language models to asses...
Excessive heat is a major and growing risk for urban residents. Here, we estimate the inequality in summertime heat-related mortality, morbidity, and electricity consumption across 5723 US municipalities and other places, housing 180 million people during the 2020 census. On average, trees in majority non-Hispanic white neighborhoods cool the air b...
Over a billion outdoor workers live in the tropics, where nearly a fifth of all hours in the year are hot and humid enough to exceed recommended safety thresholds for workers conducting heavy labor. Reviews have focused on heat impacts on worker health, well-being, and productivity, but synthesis on how to increase resilience to heat for outdoor wo...
Natural climate solutions can mitigate climate change in the near-term, during a climate-critical window. Yet, persistent misunderstandings about what constitutes a natural climate solution generate unnecessary confusion and controversy, thereby delaying critical mitigation action. Based on a review of scientific literature and best practices, we d...
Excessive heat is a major and growing risk for urban residents. Urban trees can significantly reduce summer peak temperatures, thus reducing heat-related mortality, morbidity, as well as cooling energy demand. However, urban tree canopy is inequitably distributed in US cities, which has been shown to contribute to higher summer temperatures in peop...
Worldwide, an increasing number of watershed management programs invest in nature-based solutions (NbS) to water security challenges. Yet, NbS for water security currently are deployed at well below their hypothesized cost-effective global potential, with uncertainty about costs identified as one key constraint on increased investment. Data on admi...
Despite its rich water resources, Brazil is increasingly facing extreme hydrologic events such as droughts and floods. The Sao Paulo Cantareira water supply system (CWSS) offers an opportunity to examine the potential economic benefits of nature-based solutions (NbS) to improve water security and reduce the economic cost of drought. This study expl...
Restoring tree cover in tropical countries has the potential to benefit millions of smallholders through improvements in income and environmental services. However, despite their dominant landholding shares in many countries, smallholders' role in restoration has not been addressed in prior global or pan-tropical restoration studies. We fill this l...
Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions is critical to limit global warming below 2°C. However, the magnitude and timing of beneficial effects of emissions reductions on labor productivity and the size of those effects relative to the costs of emissions reductions remain understudied. Here we use reanalysis data and climate model simulations to e...
Agroforestry systems have the potential to sequester carbon and offer numerous benefits to rural communities, but their capacity to offer valuable cooling services has not been quantified on continental scales. Here, we find that trees in pasturelands (“silvopasture”) across Latin America and Africa can offer substantial cooling benefits. These coo...
Humid heat impacts a large portion of the world’s population that works outdoors. Previous studies have quantified humid heat impacts on labor productivity by relying on exposure response functions that are based on uncontrolled experiments under a limited range of heat and humidity. Here we use the latest empirical model, based on a wider range of...
Climate change has increased heat exposure in many parts of the tropics, negatively impacting outdoor worker productivity and health. Although it is known that tropical deforestation is associated with local warming, the extent to which this additional heat exposure affects people across the tropics is unknown. In this modeling study, we combine wo...
Limited time and resources remain to constrain the climate crisis. Natural climate solutions represent promising options to protect, manage and restore natural lands for additional climate mitigation, but they differ in (1) the magnitude and (2) immediacy of mitigation potential, as well as (3) cost-effectiveness and (4) the co-benefits they offer....
Background:
Previous studies focusing on urban, industrialised regions have found that excess heat exposure can increase all-cause mortality, heat-related illnesses, and occupational injuries. However, little research has examined how deforestation and climate change can adversely affect work conditions and population health in low latitude, indus...
Spatial prioritization is a critical step in conservation planning, a process designed to ensure that limited resources are applied in ways that deliver the highest possible returns for biodiversity and human wellbeing. In practice, many spatial prioritizations fall short of their potential by focusing on places rather than actions, and by using da...
Agroforestry, or the intentional integration of trees on crop or pastureland, is a sustainable land use system that provides ecosystem services including climate change mitigation and private benefits for smallholders. While existing reviews of agroforestry adoption focus on government policy, there is increasing interest from, and opportunities fo...
Alongside the steep reductions needed in fossil fuel emissions, natural climate solutions (NCS) represent readily deployable options that can contribute to Canada’s goals for emission reductions. We estimate the mitigation potential of 24 NCS related to the protection, management, and restoration of natural systems that can also deliver numerous co...
Land tenure security is increasingly recognized as a foundational element for advancing global sustainable development agendas, but questions remain about how it affects human well-being and environmental outcomes. We identify 117 studies that aimed to estimate the causal effect of land tenure security interventions on these outcomes. Approximately...
Flooding is the costliest form of natural disaster and impacts are expected to increase, in part, due to exposure of new development to flooding. However, these costs could be reduced through the acquisition and conservation of natural land in floodplains. Here we quantify the benefits and costs of reducing future flood damages in the United States...
We respond to concerns raised by Baldocchi and Penuelas who question the potential for ecosystems to provide carbon sinks and storage, and conclude that we should focus on decarbonizing our energy systems. While we agree with many of their concerns, we arrive at a different conclusion: we need strong action to advance both clean energy solutions an...
Herein we investigate Life Cycle Cost (LCC) and Return on Investment (ROI) as potential decision variables for evaluating the economic performance (ROI) and financial feasibility (LCC) of a set of flood mitigation strategies over time. The main novelty of this work is the application of LCC and ROI analyses at the urban level to an asset portfolio...
Restoring source watersheds can reverse this trend, and may be a cost-effective approach for cities to reduce drinking water treatment costs while enhancing supply resiliency and protecting biodiversity among other co-benefits. Nevertheless, the potential to cost-effectively deliver key hydrologic services through watershed investments far exceeds...
Remote sensing offers an increasingly wide array of imagery with a broad variety of spectral and spatial resolution, but there are relatively few comparisons of how different sources of data impact the accuracy, cost, and utility of analyses. We evaluated the impact of satellite image spatial resolution (1 m from Digital Globe; 30 m from Landsat) o...
Animals in Florida provide a variety of benefits to people, from recreation (fishing, hunting, or wildlife viewing) to protection of human life and property (oysters and corals provide reef structures that help protect coasts from erosion and flooding). By measuring the economic value of these benefits, we can assign a monetary value to the habitat...
This effort would not have been possible without the support and dedication of many people from the Water Funds, the Latin American Water Funds Partnership (The Nature Conservancy, FEMSA Foundation, Inter-American Development Bank, Global Environmental Fund), CONDESAN, The Natural Capital Project, and many other partners. We would like to thank the...
An age-old conflict around a seemingly simple question has resurfaced: why do we conserve nature? Contention around this issue has come and gone many times, but in the past several years we believe that it has reappeared as an increasingly acrimonious debate between, in essence, those who argue that nature should be protected for its own sake (intr...
Significance
Despite often decadeslong control efforts, in many regions of the world ambient concentrations of ground-level ozone threaten human and ecosystem health. Furthermore, in many places the effects of continuing land use and climate change are expected to counteract ongoing efforts to reduce ozone concentrations. Combined with the rising c...
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have received considerable attention as a promising approach for correcting environmental externalities. Frequent shortcomings or outright lack of performance assessments of environmental interventions in general and PES projects in particular have resulted in recommendations for ”optimal” PES designs. Conditio...
Background/Question/Methods
Corporations are major drivers of change in the natural world. At the same time, they also rely on ecosystem services for everything from maintaining resource streams to protecting their factories from floods and storm damage. As ecosystems are degraded, their ability to continue to provide these often undervalued or t...
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are emerging worldwide as important mechanisms to align investments in human and natural well-being. PES projects are often defined as voluntary transactions where well-defined environmental/ecosystem services (or land uses likely to secure those services) are bought by a minimum of one service buyer, from a mi...
Market-based approaches are increasingly being advocated as tools for achieving the conservation of ecosystem services. We examine the reasons why markets so far appear to have failed to provide an efficient allocation of many ecosystem services, and identify the conditions under which markets deliver efficient resource allocation. We discuss diffe...
Recognition that the wolf has both extrinsic and intrinsic value allows
identification of many benefits that result from restored wolf populations. The term benefits need not be limited or limiting if the philosophical discourse is broadened beyond extrinsic values attached to wolf presence. Such expansion can be contextualized against a backdrop o...
This paper examines the role of the financial sector in renewable energy (RE) development. Although RE can bring socio-economic and environmental benefits, its implementation faces a number of obstacles, especially in non-OECD countries. One of these obstacles is financing: underdeveloped financial sectors are unable to efficiently channel loans to...
Conservation of species and their habitats yields economic benefits to society. The principal U.S. species conservation law, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), requires the designation of critical habitat for ESA-listed species. The ESA provides room for economic analysis to enter conservation decisions by stipulating that the decision to designate...
In 1998 the Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) was reintroduced to the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area (BRWRA), located in east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico, as a result of efforts to reestablish a wild population of Mexican gray wolves in the species' former home range. Because the gray wolf is a large predator and a species that...
Much economic literature expounds the superior cost-effectiveness of economic incentive (EI) policies over command-and-control (CAC) ones, based on appealing theoretical arguments. However, one of the assumptions underlying much of this literature is that monitoring and enforcement (M&E) of policies are not only feasible, but essentially costless....
Economic and population growth in Asia over the last three decades has been unprecedented. While conventional economic indicators have been increasing consistently, indicators of resource and environmental quality have been deteriorating, raising questions about the implications of future growth. Economic growth in the future is considered to be co...
The question is extremely important, because economics is the foundation upon which most decisions affecting agriculture, fisheries, and the environment and, indeed, most aspects of our daily lives are based. Natural scientists, including biological scientists, may have particular views on this or that economic policy, but few question the legitima...
This chapter provides an overview of Costa Rica's experiences with the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) demanded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It critiques the neoclassical economic theory underlying these policies, and gives an evaluation of the efficacy of these policies. The major problems caused by SAPs and e...
This chapter examines the industrial component of the Costa Rican economy and quantitatively and qualitatively reviews the historical aspects and trends, including the impact of internally and externally derived policies. It discusses several emerging industries, including tourism, textiles, and computers. There are two important components of sust...
There is evidence that Wilderness reduces costs for livestock depredations caused by the endangered and threatened gray wolf (Canis lupus) in the northern Rockies and upper Midwest, U.S.A. From 1995 to 2004, direct costs for compensation in the northern Rockies came to only 47 to 78 percent of losses anticipated at wolf reintroduction and projected...
