Reversing the loss of nature and reducing the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide are often addressed through parallel and sometimes separate policy and delivery mechanisms. However, they are deeply interconnected. Healthy ecosystems, particularly peatlands, woodlands, wetlands and saltmarshes, act as major carbon stores. When degraded peatlands, in particular become net carbon emitters.
Restoration and habitat creation can therefore be a crucial part of climate mitigation strategies, while simultaneously delivering co-benefits such as flood attenuation, water quality improvement, and species recovery.
Natural England’s Nature Net Zero (NNZ) research assesses the potential for England’s ecosystems to deliver the greatest increase in biodiversity while retaining carbon storage and increasing sequestration rates. The research seeks to identify the habitats and geographical locations that are most likely to make the best return on investment to increase carbon storage in nature rich habitats. It explores the theoretical potential of what Nature Recovery could achieve for Net Zero targets, if all the available land that can deliver these outcomes is restored to nature rich ecosystems.
The natural environment will need to play an important part in delivering net zero as healthy ecosystems take up and store significant amounts of carbon in soils and trees. Large loss of habitat and the degrading of ecosystem processes over the past century has resulted in a direct loss of carbon stored within them. Restoring these for nature recovery at scale, will reinstate many of these ecosystem processes and reverse the decline in biodiversity loss along with the added climate benefit.
This work starts to quantify where the greatest carbon gains can be made in England’s natural environment, and how speeding up near term investment in certain ecosystems will deliver long term public benefits, reduce carbon emissions and help restore healthy soils.