Actors: Who’s Behind The Wheel

Time: approximately a 30 + minute read (excluding activities)

The scheme of NbS has not simply emerged out of thin air. It has a large and powerful network of colluding actors who have driven and continue to drive its development and implementation in order to profit off of exacerbating the climate crisis while avoiding accountability for their role in the crisis and positioning themselves as key players in addressing it (IEN 2022). These drivers of NbS include corporations, governments, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs (particularly conservation NGOs), academia, and the science-policy field. Some industrial players and business groups that have explicitly expressed support for NbS include, but are not limited to: BP, Chevron, Shell, Dow Chemical Company, Bayer-Boeing, Nestlé, CocaCola, Unilever, Amazon, Delta Airlines, Microsoft, HSBC, Procter and Gamble, Novartis, Woodside Energy, International Paper, Olam, WBCSD, World Economic Forum, Business for Nature, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the International Chamber of Commerce, We Mean Business Coalition, the Capitals Coalition and the International Emissions Trading Association.

Critical Questions for this Section:

As you read through this section, some questions to carry with you are:

• Why would this actor be interested in pushing for NbS?
• What do they stand to gain? What do they lose or miss out on if they don’t back NbS?
• Why is it a bigger, more established institution that is pushing for NbS?
• Who isn’t on this list that you thought might be? Why aren’t solar and wind companies on this list?
• Why do you think it is institutions of the Global North that are pushing for NbS (and not Global South)?
• Is there anyone missing from this list?

Layout of this Section:

When participants enter this section, the first thing they see are various color-coded circles/bubbles with broad actor category names. When participants click on a broad category bubble, a 1-2 paragraph explanation opens up along with linkages to specific actor case studies bubbles. Participants can click on these specific actor bubbles one by one for details.

Below these bubbles is an interactive Power Map/flowchart of all the actors.

Prototype of Actors Map

Intergovernmental

Intergovernmental institutions, particularly the United Nations and the World Bank, have been central in launching NbS on the global scale, legitimizing and promoting them as climate solutions, and driving their widespread adoption and implementation. In 2007, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the World Bank launched REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), the predecessor of NbS. Then in 2008, a World Bank report was the first major publication to introduce NbS as a climate “solution” which highlighted the Bank’s investment in biodiversity conservation. In 2009, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a leader in conservation, submitted a position paper to the UNFCCC 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) pushing for the scale up of NbS (see later on the section on conservation NGOs). It is also important to note that some of these institutions, including conservation NGOs, as we will see later, have been extremely active trying to incorporate Indigenous actors into their initiatives. This is an effort to neutralize dissent from Indigenous communities by using funds towards NbS and obtaining their consent. There is also a significant amount of ‘gender responsiveness’ language in NbS projects, which is a kind of liberal feminism and another attempt to neutralize dissent.

The United Nations has been a big proponent of NbS by affirming that NbS “can provide over one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030.” A 2022 report by the UN Environmental Programme titled “State of Finance for Nature” calls for an urgent doubling of the current US$154 billion annual global investments in NbS required to “halt biodiversity loss, significantly contribute to reducing/removing emissions (5 GtCO2/ year by 2025 further rising to 13–15 GtCO2/year by 2050) and restore close to 1 billion ha of degraded land.”  The report also calls for further and accelerated commodification of our oceans through increased investments in marine NbS, claiming that much more than 9 percent of global NbS investments should be going to marine NbS. 

Governmental

Governments working with the private sector are pushing NbS to assert their power over climate “solutions” and continue ignoring their role in creating the social and ecological destruction that has led to the climate crisis in the first place. Supporting for-profit agendas, several national governments and intergovernmental bodies, including the European Union, have developed policies and initiatives to advance NbS. At COP26 the WWF (World Wildlife Fund for Nature) estimated that 92% of countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) included agendas to implement some form of NbS.

Case Study: United States: White House Nature-Based Solutions Roadmap (US)

In November 2022, at the UNFCCC COP27 in Egypt, President Biden released a Nature-Based Solutions Roadmap, a strategy to scale up NbS adoption across federal agencies and serve as a supposed example for other nations to do the same: “We invite partners, communities, and other nations to join the Biden-Harris Administration in taking aggressive action to advance nature-based solutions as powerful tools that the world needs now.” This Roadmap not only includes resources that market NbS in woke-washed language as the perfect “equitable” solution for people and the planet, but also investments of over $25 billion to support and incentivize implementation of NbS projects. The plan to deeply integrate NbS across government agencies on federal and local levels is extremely dangerous and makes it even more difficult to challenge and reverse the harms of NbS. However, as this plan is still in its early stages, there is still room to intervene.

Another concerning element of the roadmap is a working group that is developing cost-benefit analysis tools for nature based solutions. These cost-benefit analysis tools are used uncritically by policy makers as supposed objective tools to make policy decisions that affect people’s lives and ecosystems. Ironically, the Roadmap claims that, “Nature-based solutions play a critical role in the economy, national security, human health, equity, and the fight against climate change,” somehow assuming  that NbS can both support national security and equity. We know that national security only exacerbates inequity and climate change. NbS is being used to greenwash US imperial pursuits. The Department of Defense is developing a guide on NbS for military installation planners and managers to integrate into military base management. Further, one of the benefits of NbS listed in the White House NbS Resource Guide, is that it “support(s) military operation and readiness.” While this may sound ironic, knowing that NbS is a false solution with the goals of profit extraction and delaying systems change, it is actually very much in line with the colonial logics of national security.

Case Study: The European Union

The European Union (EU) is also increasingly pushing for NbS by supporting the funding, collaboration and jobs, projects, results and publications related to NbS. The EU funded “research and innovation” including nature-based solutions through its program 2014-2020 Horizon 2020 with a budget of €80 billion, which was succeeded by Horizon Europe with a budget of €95.5 billion (European Commission and European Commission). It says the EU is, “aiming to position itself as a world leader in NbS research, and thus supports projects such as NetworkNature gather and synergize the efforts of the European NbS community.” Many European cities and regions have implemented NbS projects such as Amsterdam (NbS for greening the city and increasing resilience) or Berlin (NbS for urban connectivity and biodiversity).

The EU policy on NbS claims that “nature-based solutions help to create new jobs and economic growth” yet so far there is little evidence or plan on how decent jobs can be delivered by the European Commission through these NbS projects. NetworkNature, a database on NbS funded by the European Commission, published a report in collaboration with Global Youth Biodiversity Network, Youth4Nature and YOUNGO, titled, “What are nature-based solutions? Risks, concerns and opportunities,” which highlights the potential of NbS to create colonial dynamics. The report states that “when funding for environmental projects are sent to the Global South, great care should be taken that these projects are not used in order to offset carbon activity in the global North without reform on their behalf. And that Indigenous knowledge and rights are taken into consideration, when implementing projects outside the European Union.” It is unclear, given the EU’s colonial legacy, whether there is any plan in place for this to be avoided.

Additionally, the European Commission and the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication started a dialogue on NbS in 2015, an interesting relationship given Brazil’s history of violations of Indigenous rights. Recently, the EU has also taken interest in sustainably financing marine policies and research programmes, an emerging field of NbS, which will be interesting to keep an eye on.

Conservation NGOs

The scheme of NbS was originally developed by big conservation NGOs to channel more corporate funding to so-called “protected areas” under their control, essentially to support and expand their enclosure of land. In 2009, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) wrote a position paper for COP 15 promoting NbS as “an integral part of broader adaptation and mitigation plans and strategies.” In 2017, The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation NGO which holds about 3.1 million acres of land on Turtle Island, commissioned a paper on “Natural Climate Solutions” which inaccurately stated that NbS can provide 37% of the CO2 reduction needed by 2030. Despite the lacking basis of this statement as it relies on entirely hypothetical calculations and highly implausible assumptions, this paper is still widely cited at the policy level in support of NbS, and often with the added call for a third of climate funding to be allocated to NbS projects, and therefore allocated to conservation organizations (WRM 2021).

Through such strategic introduction, development and championing of NbS alongside their leveraging of the massive amount of land they violently occupy, conservation NGOs have wrongly positioned themselves as central actors in addressing the climate crisis and secured corporate funding from polluting industries who are looking for such solutions that allow them to continue polluting and hoarding wealth. According to a 2015 quote from Justin Adams from TNC: “We need to find new ways of bringing private sector actors in.The Nature Conservancy has relationships, it has land assets, it has field programmes around the world. If we can leverage all of that, then the Nature Conservancy can play a very, very important role in addressing the climate challenge” (WRM 2021). In 2020, TNC, World Wildlife Fund, and Environmental Defense Fund, among other NGOs in support of NbS received $100 million USD each from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon’s Earth Fund (WRM 2021; TNC 2021; WWF 2021; ). Like said earlier, there is an effort to buy Indigenous communities’ consent. The Nature Conservancy particularly has a large strategic interaction and outreach with Indigenous communities. Their website has a whole section dedicated to “Indigenous People and Local Communities” with the opening “Building trust. Acknowledging the past. Listening always” and a series of programs dedicated to restoring relationships with Indigenous communities. You can find more here and here.

Corporations / Private Sector

Corporations have a keen interest in offsetting projects such as NbS because they allow them to continue and increase their extraction while professing to be fighting climate change (or becoming “climate neutral”). Forestry, agriculture, and fossil fuel industries in particular are some of the largest beneficiaries and supporters of NbS. In addition to serving as greenwashing tools, NbS can actually serve as revenue streams for corporations. Corporations that have NbS projects can sell commodities generated from these projects such as timber and fish stocks, along with carbon credits (refer to carbon markets module). (IEN 2022)

Fossil Fuel Industry

Thefossil fuel industry is heavily involved in NbS, by investing in projects to claim their carbon neutrality and net zero emissions while continuing to pollute our Earth.

Case Study: Jeffrey Ubben

Jeffrey Ubben is a good case to understand how intertwined conservation NGOs, corporations and academia are in perpetuating  false solutions like NbS. Ubben is a board member of Exxon Mobil while he serves on the board of WFF and the Board of Trustees of Duke University as well as of Nature Vest. Nature Vest is the in-house impact investing team at The Nature Conservancy, one of the first conservation NGOs to push for NbS. In November 2021, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Government of Belize announced the completion of a USD 364 million debt conversion for marine conservation. It is an NbS project that is breaking ground because it is the largest debt conversion for marine conservation project to date. Further details about this project can be found later in this module here.

Case Study: Shell

Shell’s investment in NbS is a perfect example of how a major oil company is adopting false solutions to evade accountability. Shell has committed to net zero emissions by 2050, by reaching a 50% reduction of the carbon intensity of all the products it sells, claiming its total emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes. Shell’s commitment of carbon offsetting projects has a budget of $450 million. The company  claims it will work with its customers to reduce their carbon emissions as well, either by mitigating their emissions on their behalf or by supporting them in their actions to reduce emissions. This ambitious plan includes relying on the use of NbS to compensate for its emissions through reforestation projects covering an area the size of Brazil and requiring 700m hectares of land. By 2035, Shell wants to capture and store 25 million tonnes of carbon a year and to compensate for a total emissions of around 120 million tonnes a year by 2030.  This plan is unrealistic given that the voluntary carbon offset market reached 104 million tonnes in 2019 and that Shell plans to increase its liquefied natural gas (LNG) operations by 20 percent through 2025.  According to the Guardian, in 2020, Shell invested about $90million in NbS projects by acquiring  the Australian company Select Carbon that works on developing and monitoring carbon sequestration projects. In 2021, Shell announced it would invest about $100million a year in nature-based projects. That year, it allocated more than $480m to various projects – more than $456m of it for NbS projects – to be deployed across the length of the contracts.  According to Shell’s website its NbS projects include: carbon farming in Australia, restoring degraded lands in the Philippines; regenerating mangroves in Senegal;and promoting sustainable farming in Zambia.

Shell is using NbS to continue its fossil fuel agenda, often lacking scientific backing for its carbon offsets project.  Why are Shell’s NbS solutions problematic? Friends of the Earth International Netherlands breaks down the reasons why Shell’s NbS solutions are false and problematic:

• Storing CO2 in trees is a temporary solution because Shell’s CO2 emissions will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years to come.
• Shell plants trees of one species, for example, the fast-growing eucalyptus trees which damages biodiversity. Often these trees are genetically engineered (GE) trees. For example, two varieties of eucalyptus trees have already been approved in Brazil, which  is the first country to authorize their commercial use. This has led to calls to stop their plantations in Brazil in 2015.
• Land is needed to offset Shell’s emissions and this land is often located in the Global South, leading to human rights violations.
• 80% of Shell’s current CO2 offsets go towards protecting and not planting new trees, which according to FOE’s report, present many loopholes.

All these solutions are false considering that Shell continues to invest in oil and gas to please its  shareholders with a $8 billion budget for oil and gas production and $4 billion in fossil gas instead of making absolute cuts in oil production. In an interview with Reuters in 2019, chief executive Ben van Beurden stated that “despite what a lot of activists say, it is entirely legitimate to invest in oil and gas because the world demands it.”

Timber and Forest Products Industries

Timber and forest products industries have created false narratives around forests and climate to keep profiting from logging and replacing natural forests with industrial tree plantations. For example, these industries intentionally ignore the distinction between natural forests and tree plantations such as industrial monocultures that destroy natural habitats, displace natural forests and do harm to Indigenous Peoples who depend on forests for their survival. Part of this narrative includes spreading the false notion that younger trees are better at sequestering carbon than older ones when in reality, old growth forests store more carbon in the active carbon cycle than tree plantations. These industries also claim that forests are in need of “thinning”, stating that wildfires can be controlled by thinning and logging. To reinforce all these narratives, corporations support the creation of genetically engineered (GE) trees – claimed to sequester carbon faster –  which are being experimented across the world, including the U.S. and Brazil. These narratives put forth by forest industries also create new demands for wood that are claimed to be under “sustainable certification standards.”  No certification standards can be sustainable and no deforestation can be tackled if demands for wood increase, and forests are harmed by excessive  logging and the introduction of new plantations.

Agribusiness

Today, Indigenous Peoples, small-scale farmers and other farmers using agroecology, who are mostly women, provide food to more than 70% of the world’s population using less than 25% of the agricultural land. (—> You can jump to real solutions sections to see how agroecology is a form of resistance to agribusiness.) Yet, since the 1980s, the agricultural system based on capitalism is being managed by a few multinational corporations, the so-called agribusiness. They control seeds and chemicals, promote unsustainable farming practices through government lobbying to increase their profits. 44% to 57% of all greenhouse emissions come from the industrial food chain such as industrial-scale production, and deforestation. Climate SMART agriculture, soil sequestration programs, NbS, payments for environmental services (PES) are all projects that should supposedly sequester carbon and reduce emissions. These projects are sold as carbon offsets in carbon trading systems or as tax breaks in a carbon tax system, allowing polluters to keep polluting. These multinational corporations, additionally, to encourage investments in agriculture that rely on tech and automation, grab land from small-scale farmers and forest-dwelling communities. Like in the case of Shell, illustrated earlier, these corporations buy up lands, sell carbon credits and claim to advance net zero emissions. Agribusiness has also been heavily pushing for genetically-engineered (GE) crops and trees claiming that GE varieties can reduce emissions. Companies like Monsanto/Bayer, Dow, BASF and Syngenta among others are developing “climate friendly” crop varieties through GE processes (La Via Campesina 2018).

Case Study: Nestlé

“Nestlé has made big commitments to support “nature based solutions” (NBS) for food or “nature positive food” which forms Action Track 3 of the UNFSS. Nestlé claims it will achieve net- zero climate emissions from its support for NBS. Yet, rather than decreasing the production of its most emission-intensive products such as industrial meat and dairy, Nestlé is planning on increasing production of dairy, livestock, and commodity products by 68 percent by 2030. It is intending to rely primarily on carbon offset credits to make up for this drastic increase in emissions.” (Food Systems 4 People 2021; GRAIN 2021)

Academia

Around the world many academic institutions are supporting NbS through initiatives, partnerships, and perhaps most importantly by condoning NbS both to those in the environmental field and the young minds who will influence climate policy for years to come. Academic institutions promoting NbS include but are not limited to: Princeton University, Yale University, Stanford University, Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Oxford, University of California Santa Cruz, National University of Singapore, University of Maine, University of Berkley, Instituto de Hidráulica Ambiental, Universidad de Cantabria, Spain amd Stockholm University, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Yale, for example, has initiatives centering NbS such the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, and the Yale School of the Environment hold a course on Natural Climate Solutions. In the media, YaleEnvironment360 published an article in 2022 asking Why Are Nature-Based Solutions on Climate Being Overlooked? At the University of Oxford, there is a Nature-Based Solutions Initiative; University of California Santa Cruz is in collaboration the Nature Conservancy on an initiative called Symposium on Natural and Nature-based Features (NNBF) and the National University of Singapore has a Center on Nature-based Climate Solutions (CNCS). Often these initiatives are promoted by big polluters that are using academia around the world to push and validate NbS through corporate-funded partnerships and research. For example, Exxon has funded Stanford University’s The Global and Energy Project (GCEP) which has produced more than 900 papers in leading journals and more than 1,2000 presentations at conferences on carbon capture and storage and NbS. (The Big Con 2021)

Science-Policy Field

Both the scientific and policy spheres, represented by organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, support NbS.  The role of modern science and the modern scientific spheres in supporting and legitimizing NbS points to a larger trend of unchallenged acceptance of modern scientific knowledge.

In the 2021 IPCC report, nature-based solutions are highlighted as a tool for climate mitigation “due to its co-benefits in improving human well-being.” In 2021, IPBES and IPCC published a joint report on the interactions between biodiversity and climate change  as a part of a workshop that highlighted the role of NbS. The report states that “Nature-based solutions (NbS) can play an important role in climate mitigation, but the extent is debated, and they can only be effective with ambitious reductions in all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Nature-based solutions can be most effective when planned for longevity and not narrowly focussed on rapid carbon sequestration.” (IPBES IPCC 2021) The report goes to lengths to illustrate the ways in which NbS are the solution to climate adaptation and mitigation, despite admitting that “large-scale afforestation or bioenergy plantations may violate an important tenet of nature-based solutions – namely that they should simultaneously provide human well-being and biodiversity benefits.” The joint report claims the workshop is built on both scientific and Indigenous knowledge where NbS  should take in consideration needs and access rights of indigenous peoples and local communities. Yet, little space is given in the report to the ways in which Indigenous rights are protected through NbS.

Activity

Power Mapping

• Participants are encouraged to do some investigative research themselves on a specific NbS project in their community or in exploring how NbS is linked to them. We guide them by giving them tips and tools on how they might find information to map out the actors on their own.
• The purpose is for participants to learn how to do power mapping themselves and identify what actors they can/should target (esp for grassroots org audience) as well as providing a personal link to NbS.
• It can be an activity in the online curriculum to be done independently, but even more “fun” and easier to do as an activity to do in groups in workshops.
• Based on the capabilities of the website, it would be nice to have a way for people to upload their maps so they can link them to the existing map and/or to maps others have done.

Is there an NbS project happening near you? Curious to see if your employer, school, or government is tied to NbS? This is your chance to explore the links and flows of NbS projects by making your own power map. Here are some tips and tricks for doing so:

• Follow the money! When looking up an NbS project, a suspected NbS project, an organization, or an initiative, their funding sources typically reveal the true lines of power.
  • Funders can be described using a range of terms including: sponsors, donors, partners, contributors, supporters.
  • Sometimes a funder is never explicitly identified, but their logo may appear throughout websites, promotional materials, and in the acknowledgement section of reports. Always check to see who is thanked at the end of any report or publication!
  • Often funding from specific projects is hard or impossible to trace. It’s fine to get a more general sense of how money moves throughout an industry, or on initiatives that are thematically linked. You can uncover this information by looking at annual reports and/or financial statements if available.
  • Many countries require NGOs to publicly disclose certain financial information. In the US, you can refer to the IRS’ tax exempt organization search. In the UK, you can consult the register of charities.
  • Many countries have financial information about their public companies available online. For example, in the US the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has EDGAR, an online tool for researching public companies’ operations and financial information.
  • Political parties and their candidates are required to disclose their financial information as well. https://www.opensecrets.org/

• There is always a face behind the mask. All organizations are composed of people and since power tends to be concentrated in the top executives and board members of most organizations, looking into them often yields results.
  • Most nonprofits and corporations have the current and past members of their Board of Directors, Board of Trustees, and/or executives. Often their bios will include their previous professional experiences and any affiliations they may have.
  • To trace the connections between organizations, look to see which people serve in multiple boards, where people have formerly been employed/other former associations, what schools they have gone to, and who they have collaborated on previous projects with.
  • If you’re not sure how or where to begin, pick an organization that you are either personally tied to or are interested in and start looking into the people on their board of directors and/or board of trustees. Examples of organizations you might want to start with include your employer, alma mater, your bank, your electric company, big fossil fuel companies, the make of your car, or your retirement fund.