On Pomona College Week: Natural climate solutions have a role to play in fighting climate change.
Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, explores how.
Charlotte Chang is a computational sustainability scientist whose work focuses on finding solutions for nature and people to thrive together. Chang is the inaugural One Conservancy Visiting Science Fellow at The Nature Conservancy and leads the NLP for Environmental Solutions Lab at Pomona College, which uses text as a critical data modality to synthesize evidence on nature-based climate solutions, analyze public opinion on conservation policies, and evaluate social-ecological systems through machine learning, bioacoustics, and mechanistic models.
Mapping the Local Impacts of Global Nature-Based Carbon Mitigation
Natural climate solutions like reforestation, restoring wetlands and improving livestock grazing are increasingly central to global carbon mitigation. These nature-based approaches are promising: they could reduce greenhouse gas emissions while benefiting biodiversity and human communities. However, given that governments aim to commit 1.2 billion hectares to nature-based mitigation—an area four times the size of India or roughly equivalent to all global cropland—understanding their actual impacts on local people and ecosystems is essential.
My team has conducted the first comprehensive global analysis of evidence surrounding natural climate solutions. Using advanced machine learning, we analyzed over 250,000 peer-reviewed publications to assess the benefits and trade-offs of these approaches across human well-being, biodiversity and environmental outcomes.
Our evidence map revealed important patterns. Natural climate solutions with the highest potential for carbon mitigation, such as protecting forests and agroforestry, also had the most documented evidence of their impacts on people and nature. However, substantial gaps exist for other promising pathways. For instance, wetland protection and restoration, which could contribute an estimated six percent to global climate mitigation goals, showed marked uncertainty about how these interventions affect local communities and ecosystems. We saw similar trends for country-level evidence: some countries with high mitigation potential were “shovel-ready”, with abundant evidence, while other countries important for carbon mitigation had a shortfall of information.
Our findings arrive at a critical moment as centralized carbon markets expand globally, with revenues exceeding $100 billion. Our map provides a foundation for more informed, effective and fair decision-making.
