Natural Climate Solutions Enabling Project: Report - Measuring the climate change mitigation potential of the Endangered Landscape Programme

The large-scale restoration of habitats including forests, peatlands and wetlands offers opportunities to tackle the twin crises of anthropogenic climate change and global biodiversity loss. It is therefore critical that restoration projects can maximise their climate change mitigation potential while still delivering biodiversity benefits. This project aims to understand how projects can achieve this, by quantifying the potential contribution of ELP projects to such ‘natural climate solutions’ – – and explore how this can be maximised, without compromising other project goals. The results of the project will be used to promote conservation-focused natural climate solutions at key upcoming UN conferences on climate change and biodiversity. By improving understanding of the links between climate change mitigation and ecosystem integrity, this project will provide a vital hook for advocating the use of large-scale restoration as a natural climate solution with policy makers. This project will develop a tool to enable landscape restoration projects to assess their potential climate change mitigation benefits.