Natural Climate Solutions
Combating Climate Change Through Forests and Land
Jason Houston / USAID
Featured Story
The land sector is critical as both a source of emissions and as a climate change solution. Deforestation, unsustainable land management, and land degradation represent nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and nature is currently the only mechanism we have to capture and store carbon at scale. Unsustainable land use often results from agricultural expansion and poor agricultural management, illegal logging, damaging charcoal and timber production, and insecure land and resource rights.
About a third of the world’s people have a close dependence on forests and forest products. Around the world, healthy forests provide food, jobs, clean water, and resilience to climate-related shocks while storing carbon. By investing in forest conservation, management, and restoration, USAID is reducing emissions, protecting important carbon sinks, providing economic benefits for future generations, and helping build a sustainable and resilient future for people and nature.
USAID implements this work—referred to as Natural Climate Solutions—through “sustainable landscapes”-funded programs.
Our Approach
USAID helps partner countries conserve, manage, and restore globally important forests, as well as mangroves, wetlands, peatlands, and agricultural lands. We do this by mobilizing finance for nature, improving laws and governance, building institutional capacity, making information accessible, advancing equity, and supporting improved landscape management and planning. Sound management of environmental and natural resources is integral to a country’s development and resilience. USAID’s approach promotes systematic, landscape-wide solutions.
USAID has worked with more than two dozen countries to conserve, manage, and restore forests and other landscapes through bilateral, regional, and global programs. Through global programs such as SilvaCarbon and SERVIR, more than a dozen countries are better able to monitor and manage their forests. USAID programs also help partner country institutions build better systems to conduct forest inventories and measure, report, and verify carbon emissions. Natural climate solutions such as mangrove and forest conservation and restoration and climate-smart agriculture are an important bridge between global climate change mitigation and local adaptation goals.
Since 2016, USAID has mobilized more than a half billion dollars of private investment in sustainable landscapes programs, including performance-based “payment for ecosystem services” programs. In some cases, businesses pay landowners or communities to protect their forests to secure ecosystem services such as a sustainable water supply. Other programs generate carbon credits that can be sold domestically or on the international, voluntary carbon market. A third party certifies that greenhouse gas emissions were avoided or additional carbon stored as a result of the landowner’s or forest community’s conservation actions.
USAID’s Climate Strategy includes a target to conserve, restore, and manage 100 million hectares of critical landscapes—an area more than twice the size of California—by 2030. This, along with USAID’s clean energy programs, will contribute to our goal of mitigating six billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030.
Forest Conservation
USAID works with countries to protect, manage, and restore their forests. Sound management of environmental and natural resources is integral to a country’s sustainable development and resilience to climate change.
Reforestation
USAID has targeted reforestation efforts in 11 countries. Forests store carbon, are rich in biodiversity, critical to water conservation, improve health and nutrition, provide key resources that contribute to people’s livelihoods, and protect communities from the worst impacts of climate change.
Private Sector Engagement to Conserve Forests
In developing countries, the forest sector presents unique challenges and opportunities for private sector engagement. Forests provide more than 86 million jobs, and support the livelihoods of rural communities.
Featured Programs
SilvaCarbon
Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment
Green Invest Asia
Global Forest Watch
The Business Case for Collective Landscape Action
Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation and Mitigation Program (SWAMP)
Amazon Regional Environment Program (AREP)
USAID envisions a healthy and resilient Amazon Basin that is valued by society, ensures human well-being, and safeguards our global climate. The Amazon Region hosts a third of the world’s known species of plants and animals –many of which do not occur anywhere else– and is home to the largest river system in the world, representing 15 percent of the freshwater feeding the world’s oceans. Unsustainable economic development and illegal extraction of resources is causing contamination and degradation that threaten the entire Amazon ecosystem.
Forest Data Partnership
Natural Climate Solutions Knowledge Sharing Portals
Natural Climate Solutions Stories
The Power of Nature
Putting Out The Flames
Superfoods for a Super Forest
Under the Canopy: How USAID is Working in Tropical Forests to Tackle the Climate Crisis
For More Information
Climate Change
USAID Climate Strategy 2022–2030
Climate Change Country Profiles
Environment, Energy, and Infrastructure
