--- title: "twenty pathways, three verbs" canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/the-natural-climate-solutions-pathways markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/the-natural-climate-solutions-pathways.md subtitle: "protect, restore, and manage — the list is long and the places already have their own guides" category: ecosystem-services --- # twenty pathways, three verbs *protect, restore, and manage — the list is long and the places already have their own guides* What are the pathways? That is the right question. Natural climate solutions are not one thing with a green label. They are a set of conservation, restoration, and improved land management pathways across forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. A forest already exists before anyone funds it. A wetland already filters, buffers, stores, and shelters. A grassland is not waiting to become a product. The pathway is the funded change in risk, recovery, or management. Price is a bridge, never the worth. If you came from the first piece, [what natural climate solutions actually are](/guide/what-natural-climate-solutions-actually-are), this is the list underneath the phrase. :::johnson **twenty pathways are three verbs: protect, restore, manage.** The tonne helps pay for a climate service. It does not contain the whole forest, wetland, grassland, farm, coast, or community. ::: ### what are the natural climate solutions pathways? The simplest way to read the natural climate solutions pathways is by verb. **Protect** means avoid the loss. Keep a forest from being converted. Keep a coastal wetland from being damaged. Reduce a pressure that would release carbon or stop future storage. **Restore** means bring a degraded system back toward function. Reforestation and coastal wetland restoration sit here. Restoration is not decoration. It is repair with climate consequences. **Manage** means change how a working landscape is kept. Farms, grazing lands, plantations, and forests can be managed in ways that reduce emissions, increase storage, or both. That framing matters because recent nature-investment writing often treats “natural climate solutions” largely as carbon-credit and reforestation deals. Reforestation is real. Carbon credits can help finance work when claims are careful. But the full field is wider than planting trees. Improved forest management, reforestation, and avoided conversion are pathways; the biome guides own the places: [forests](/guide/what-forests-actually-are), [peatlands](/guide/what-peatlands-actually-are), [grasslands](/guide/what-grasslands-actually-are), and [coastal systems](/guide/who-pays-to-keep-the-tide-working). ### how many natural climate solutions are there? Griscom et al. identify **20 conservation, restoration, and improved land management pathways** across global forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. The main text names the pathways below. The paper’s twenty are completed in the supplement. Do not read this table as a ranking. Do not read it as tonnes by pathway. It is a map of actions. | system | protect | restore | manage | |---|---|---|---| | forests | Avoided Forest Conversion; Avoided Woodfuel Harvest | Reforestation | Natural Forest Management; Improved Plantations; Fire Management | | wetlands | Avoided Coastal Wetland Impacts | Coastal Wetland Restoration | — | | grasslands and agriculture | — | — | Biochar; Conservation Agriculture; Cropland Nutrient Management; Trees in Croplands; Grazing—Optimal Intensity; Grazing—Legumes; Grazing—Improved Feed; Grazing—Animal Management | The study estimates a maximum potential of **23.8 PgCO2e per year**, with a **95% CI of 20.3–37.4**, at a 2030 reference year. That maximum is constrained by food security, fiber security, and biodiversity conservation. It is not constrained by cost. About half of that maximum, **11.3 PgCO2e per year**, is cost-effective if the social cost of CO2 is at least **$100 per MgCO2e by 2030**. Natural climate solutions can provide **37%** of the cost-effective CO2 mitigation needed through 2030 for a greater than **66%** chance of holding warming below **2°C**. One-third of that cost-effective slice can be delivered at or below **$10 per MgCO2**. Those figures are useful because they keep the category from becoming vague. They are also partial. Water filtration, flood buffering, soil health, biodiversity habitat, and enhanced climate resilience are named co-benefits in the abstract. They are not inside the tonne. That is why ensurance treats funding as a pathway, not as a claim to own the living system. Ensurance can help route payment toward stewardship. It does not make the forest, wetland, coast, or grassland valuable. They already are. ### what is the difference between protect, restore, and manage? Protect is about avoided loss. A city that drinks an unfiltered forested supply already pays for that forest as water, not only as carbon. A company on the same kind of supply has the same split. Who those payors are is a later question: [who pays for natural climate solutions](/guide/who-pays-for-natural-climate-solutions). Restore is about repair. A degraded site may still hold memory, seed, water, soil structure, or community knowledge. Restoration does not create nature from nothing. It helps a damaged system recover enough function to store carbon, slow water, cool places, or shelter life again. That is why reforestation and coastal wetland restoration belong in the same family of verbs even though the places are different. Manage is about working land. Agricultural land and grazing land are not outside natural climate solutions. The paper includes cropland nutrient management, trees in croplands, conservation agriculture, biochar, and several grazing pathways. That does not turn every acre into a carbon farm. It means management choices can affect emissions and storage while the land keeps producing food, fiber, or livelihood. The safeguards are not a footnote. The maximum potential is constrained by food security, fiber security, and biodiversity conservation. It is not a license to plant over cropland, simplify habitat, displace people, or treat every acre as if its best use were a carbon spreadsheet. Carbon protocols can help define baselines, monitoring, leakage, permanence, and claim boundaries. They are useful discipline. They are not the whole public reason to fund the work. For land stewards, the table helps name what they are already doing or could do with better support. For governments, it separates public goods from procurement slogans. For investors, it says the climate logic is real, but the asset is not the tonne alone. If you want the place-based view next, read [forests, peat, and mangroves are on the list](/guide/forests-peat-and-mangroves-are-on-the-list). If you want a living forest agent rather than a guide page, start with [temperate forests](/temperate-forests.ensurance?from=guide). ## sources - [Griscom et al., “Natural climate solutions,” PNAS, 2017](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710465114) — Source for the 20 pathways, maximum potential, cost-effective potential, below-2°C share, low-cost slice, safeguards, and co-benefits named here. - [The Nature Conservancy, natural climate solutions](https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-insights/perspectives/natural-climate-solutions/) — Public framing from one of the institutions behind the natural climate solutions work. - [Project Drawdown, forest protection](https://drawdown.org/solutions/forest-protection) — A practical mitigation framing for avoided forest loss and the climate value of protection. - [Verra, verified carbon standard](https://verra.org/programs/verified-carbon-standard/) — One example of carbon-market rules used to structure claims, monitoring, and verification. ## the series - [what natural climate solutions actually are](/guide/what-natural-climate-solutions-actually-are) - [twenty pathways, three verbs](/guide/the-natural-climate-solutions-pathways) - [forests, peat, and mangroves are on the list](/guide/forests-peat-and-mangroves-are-on-the-list) - [the tonne is real and partial](/guide/the-carbon-tonne-is-not-the-climate) - [who pays for natural climate solutions](/guide/who-pays-for-natural-climate-solutions) - [how natural climate solutions get funded](/guide/how-natural-climate-solutions-get-funded)