Show Notes:  Shifting political priorities and economic pressures over the past couple of years have seen several countries scale back climate commitments contributing to the growing gap between climate pledges and real-world emissions (still rising).

What does this mean for a ‘Just Transition’ and Net Zero? While there is no silver bullet, IUCN and UNEP emphasise Nature based Solutions (NbS) can be pivotal for climate mitigation and adaptation, when pursued alongside rapid decarbonisation globally.

To discuss NbS, and climate change I recently caught up with Swapan Mehra a global leader in climate action and ecosystem conservation. In this deeply insightful conversation Swapan spoke about how NbS is a holistic approach to addressing the climate crisis, through a spectrum of actions designed to protect and restore ecosystems while simultaneously delivering co-benefits for biodiversity, communities and individuals. We also spoke about…

👉🏾 How NbS are fundamental in agrarian contexts like India, where communities are inextricably linked to their natural environments.

👉🏾 The practical implementations of NbS in India's Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), that highlight the ambitious targets set for increasing forest carbon stocks by 2.5 to 3 billion tons by 2030

👉🏾  The challenges to adoption by the private sector 

·      Lack of standardised financial mechanisms, regulatory hurdles, and insufficient data and knowledge about NbS performance and returns

👉🏾 NbS frameworks including IUCN; Voluntary carbon markets integrity initiative

👉🏾 Investor expectation vs reality

👉🏾 Voluntary carbon markets, carbon credits and greenwashing

We also spoke about India’s carbon trading and green credit scheme, leadership commitment, the impact on SMEs, projects he is particularly proud and being a climate optimist……

“To me, just transition means ensuring that climate action doesn't come at a cost of life, livelihoods, equity, inclusion, but rather climate action promotes life, livelihood, equity, inclusion. In the context of the global south, especially India, where our communities have such a direct relationship with nature, with our landscapes, this means putting farmers first, indigenous communities first, it means ensuring investments which are locally contextualized to the needs of the communities and ensuring that a large part of the benefit flows to them. These are communities who have not played a major role in actually causing climate change, and now yet we are dependent on them to solve the problem for us.”

 Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good afternoon, Swapan. Wonderful to catch up again after a long time

Swapan: Good afternoon, Sudha. Very good to catch up.

Sudha: Let's get started with a quick introduction. Tell us a bit about yourself and IORA Ecological Solutions.

Swapan: Sure. So, firstly, thank you for having me on your podcast Sudha. I'm Swapan Mehra, I'm the founder and CEO of IORA Ecological Solutions. IORA Ecological Solutions is a leading developer of nature-based solutions, policies, implementation plans and action on ground in India. Over the last 15 years, we worked across 200 projects in the areas of forest conservation, forest restoration, and sustainable agriculture, while also helping India and many other countries develop leading policies to not only plan action on climate change, but also execute this action through financing and technology. Our mission is to make nature count, our mission is to ensure that there is holistic conservation of nature, of biodiversity and the communities who depend on nature.

Sudha: That's very, very interesting.

So, from our previous conversations and what I've read about IORA, I understand that, like you said, nature-based solutions for climate mitigation adaptation are pivotal to the work that you do. So what counts as nature-based solutions and why are nature-based solutions crucial to tackling climate change?

Swapan: Well, that's a great question. So nature-based solutions is a broad category of actions which in summary are actions that can protect, sustainably manage, and restore modified ecosystems while providing the core benefits of biodiversity, climate mitigation, climate adaptation, human wellbeing. Some examples of nature-based solution include afforestation, reforestation forest conservation, mangrove restoration soil and sand, enhancement, et cetera.

Now, why are nature-based solutions gaining a lot of traction? I think there are multiple reasons. One is that it's mildly accepted that nature-based solutions have the capability to deliver close to 30% of all mitigation actions, which are needed to stay below the two degree levels, which are enshrined in all of the global NDCs by 2030, a third of the actions.

The second reason is that nature-based solutions, like I mentioned earlier, deliver a lot of core benefits, versus any other solution, I'm not saying that our nature-based solutions are more important or less important than technology-based solutions. But as compared to other solutions, these core benefits of nature-based solutions are immense, especially in an agrarian vulnerable country like India.

If you're able to restore lands, restore water bodies, aforest, it can help tremendously in reducing climate risk for communities, helping creating jobs, help in ensuring livelihoods are sustained. Lastly there are two kinds of climate actions that we broadly have been all working on in the last few years.

One is actions that lead to avoidance of emissions. Second, which lead to, removal of emissions, which are already out there. While renewable energy and such categories, which have gained a lot of investment in the last few years, which is critical to the global pathway of decarbonisation, we all agree that there is already a lot of emissions out there, which are already starting to warm the globe, the process has already started. This is now a well-established fact, which means that we also need to balance this out with a lot of removals.

In the removal space, nature-based solutions have a distinct advantage also of being cost effective. Industrial removals, carbon capture are still very expensive, given that nature-based solutions have the ability to remove at a fair price locked carbon for periods of 30, 40, 50 years, which is what the world needs to move towards, net zero technologies and their core benefits. This is the reason why nature solutions are gaining a lot of traction and attention now.

Sudha: Yeah, my, first interaction was at the Planet Cognisphere event and so it's interesting to see, that it prioritizes not just, removals, but it prioritizes communities, and it looks at community impact and the cost of doing this entire process, because who's going to finance, where's the money going to come from?

So I think we definitely need low-cost innovations, and this sounds like a great way, to approach and, address the challenges. So, the NBS have been, incorporated into the NDCs as a part of the country's strategies, and you have helped develop India's National REDD+ strategy.

Tell us a bit more about it.

Swapan: So, yeah, Sudha most countries now have a major component of nature-based solution in their NDCs, this includes major budgets for afforestation, for reducing deforestation, and even in some cases for reducing emissions from agriculture.

So those components are there in various NDCs. India where we've had the pleasure and the privilege to be helping the Ministry of Environment Forest, making a roadmap for the NBS part of its NDC, has a major target to increase carbon stocks in India's forest and tree cover by two and a half to 3 billion tons by 2030, which is a major target.

Now, NDC targets are also slightly related to this instrument called REDD plus. REDD plus is an instrument which is being developed by the UN, in an effort to reduce emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and also to enhance the quality of the forest, the plus stands for Sustainable Forest Management and Enhancement.

REDD Plus has been under development for many years, the World Tree Carbon markets have adopted REDD plus in various forms, and there have been many projects, many initiatives. We had a chance to develop India's National REDD Plus policy and guidance document back in the day. Now there are also some challenges when it comes to REDD plus.

REDD plus is a very critical instrument. I especially feel that it needs to be promoted more and more because there is a distinct advantage of conserving existing good forest over creating new forest. I'm not saying creating new forest is not a good strategy, it is, but the true system service is the biodiversity, and very importantly, the culture and heritage enshrined in existing forests.

In order to regain that, the process for a n