Experts discuss solutions to boost investment in ecosystems while advancing economic development at the first “Convergent Conversations” event.
By Alison Gold
The Catskills, a tree-covered mountain belt in upstate New York, supply 90% of New York City’s drinking water. In this rich ecosystem, Professor Pamela Templer completed her early work in science as a graduate student, examining how the presence of certain tree species in the region could affect the watershed and, ultimately, water quality in a major city more than 100 miles away.
In other words, she was tracking how changing certain aspects of an ecosystem could ultimately influence human and environmental health.
“We didn’t call it this when I first started, but the term that now is so commonly used is ‘nature-based solutions,’” said Templer, now a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology in Boston University’s College of Arts & Sciences, and Core Faculty at the Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS).
Nature-based solutions, like reforestation or seagrass restoration, harness the power of the natural world to promote human and environmental health. Planting trees, for example, can improve air quality and reduce extreme summer heat while also absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Increasingly, researchers are also becoming aware of the need to grow financial investment in these initiatives while leveraging them to drive economic development. Several innovative mechanisms are already financially rewarding countries for preserving their forests.
This intersection between finance and ecology was the focus of the first event in the Convergent Conversations series, an initiative of BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) to tackle research questions across disciplines on pressing sustainability challenges. Moderated by Templer, Scaling Nature-Based Solutions for Economic Development was hosted March 19, incorporating perspectives from across BU with the collaboration of the Global Development Policy Center, Earth & Environment and Biology departments, and the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
Panelists Explore Global Financial Mechanisms Designed to Accelerate Nature-Based Solutions
Frances Seymour (Senior Policy Advisor, Woodwell Climate Research Center) offered ideas to accelerate the financing of nature-based solutions by linking to mainstream private financial systems. Forests, Seymour said, absorb carbon dioxide emissions, cool the climate, generate rainfall, and maintain soil moisture, making them essential for food, water, and energy security.
Rapidly halting and reversing deforestation by 2030 is a priority for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Seymour is supporting the Forest Climate Leaders Partnership, a new coalition of dozens of countries that has named six solutions for financing reforestation, including pathways to boost public and private investments, and new financial methods created specifically to support forests.
The Tropical Forest Forever Facility in Brazil is one such initiative that pays tropical forest nations for keeping their forests intact. Seymour described the structure as “a unique financial engineering money-making machine,” where donor funds from nations and philanthropies leverage long-term commercial capital. The blended funds are invested aggressively, churning out profits for investors and forest nations.
Many governments and corporations striving to reach their net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goals purchase carbon credits, which purport to fund nature-based solutions, like reforestation, to absorb emissions. Through another innovative financial mechanism, JREDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation at jurisdictional scale), entire states or countries, rather than individual projects, can issue high-quality carbon credits. JREDD+ measures emissions and removals over a larger geographic area, and can incorporate smaller carbon credit projects while increasing overall social and environmental integrity.
“While one catastrophic fire event might wipe out all the forest carbon stock in a project-scale initiative, it would only be a small percentage of the carbon stock in [a larger] jurisdiction,” Seymour said.
Through JREDD+, governments can perform functions essential to halting and reversing deforestation at scale, such as enforcing the law or recognizing the rights of Indigenous peoples.
Kevin Gallagher (Professor, Global Development Policy, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies; Director, Global Development Policy Center; IGS Affiliated Faculty) presented on the macroeconomic forces that can drive a country to degrade its own environment.
Forest-rich countries are often pressured to cut down their trees for export. This is driven by what Gallagher described as a prevalent “vicious cycle”: a nation in debt seeks assistance from the International Monetary Fund, and is advised to slash environmental spending and increase exports to pay off debts. The nation may have to ramp up deforestation to produce key exports like timber. Gallagher is now working with a coalition of governments “to move from this vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle, where you have an investment-led recovery.”
A virtuous cycle, he said, would “respond to crises, to have strategic green investments that can bring greater resilience, protect nature and improve the fiscal space, and create economic growth.”
As an example, he noted how in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act increased investment in green technologies to spur economic growth and job creation following the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than dropping environmental investments.
Lucy Hutyra (Distinguished Professor and Chair, Earth & Environment, College of Arts & Sciences; IGS Core Faculty) recommended improvements to the carbon credit market. The market for buying, selling, and trading carbon credits has historically been weakly regulated, Hutyra and her colleagues found in a comprehensive study. The team pinpointed several specific ways to enhance transparency and promote reliable, high-quality carbon credits and environmental benefits.
Hutyra said the baselines for carbon crediting should be dynamic, transparent, and adjusted for shifting landscape conditions. Plus, organizations issuing carbon credits should appropriately plan for a reasonable amount of risk. To prepare for risks like forest fires or other disasters that could destroy forests intended to be used for carbon credits, issuers create “buffer pools,” or extra forest reserves. These buffer pools are often based on very conservative risk estimates. Hutyra says they should be sized according to the regional disturbance and fire risks.
There is enormous potential for channeling private finance into carbon sequestration, she added, naming several recent advancements toward more rigorous and transparent crediting standards. One of these is the formation of an independent body called the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, which has “started to differentiate these protocols and these credits, applying what they’re calling core carbon principles,” Hutyra said. As a result, higher-quality, certified carbon credits are now worth far more than others on the market.
An Opportunity for Continued Convergence
As the event concluded, Seymour stated the importance of academic partners for enhancing access to data and modelling capabilities to drive policymaking decisions. Hutyra noted that while much of the conversation centered on forests, she hopes to draw in scholars working on nature-based solutions in mangroves, seagrasses, and more in future work. Gallagher reflected on the distinct tradition of convergence and collaboration that defines BU – producing an environment for conversations like this one.
“Conversations like these across disciplines, in this case global finance and natural sciences, are an important step toward Boston University’s commitment to tackling the pressing challenges of our times with distinct but complementary toolkits.”
– IGS Executive Director Rebecca Pearl-Martinez
IGS Executive Director Rebecca Pearl-Martinez similarly noted, “conversations like these across disciplines, in this case global finance and natural sciences, are an important step toward Boston University’s commitment to tackling the pressing challenges of our times with distinct but complementary toolkits.”