Infrastructure Policy and Programs: Nature Based Solutions | Article

Nature-based solutions contribute to climate resilience by providing protection against extreme heat and coastal storms, while also supplying co-benefits like wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration. Living shorelines, restored wetlands, reforestation projects, and green (vegetative) roofs are a few examples of nature-based solutions.

Natural systems can be protected, expanded, and managed as infrastructure, often at equal or less cost than traditional—or gray—infrastructure projects, like bulkheads. Nature-based building materials such as mass timber can also be used in infrastructure projects as both a climate adaptation and mitigation strategy by improving forest management and sequestering carbon.

EESI has created multiple resources on nature-based policies and programs during the 116th and 117th Congresses, including:

Report

A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities

This report includes 30 federal policy recommendations to improve coastal resilience, including six that fall into the nature-based solutions category (page 47).

Fact Sheets

Federal Resources for Nature-based Solutions to Climate Change

This fact sheet provides a survey of federal funding and technical assistance programs available to help state and local governments and agencies, tribes, non-governmental organizations, universities, and individuals implement nature-based solutions for climate resilience.

Nature as Resilient Infrastructure: An Overview of Nature-based Solutions

By surveying definitions of nature-based solutions and providing specific examples of solutions and projects, this fact sheet contributes to the national conversation about two critical policy issues: how to fix America’s crumbling infrastructure and how to make communities more resilient to climate impacts.

Briefings

Natural Climate Solutions: A Win-Win Solution for Our Environment and Our Economy

Panelists provided an overview of the diverse range of climate-sensitive strategies that can be implemented in America’s farms and ranches, forests, grasslands, and urban communities. They also discussed the many economic benefits that can be derived from implementing natural climate solutions.

Congressional Climate Camp #4: Federal Policies for Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Win-Wins

Speakers covered nature-based solutions for coasts, agriculture, and forestry.

Growing Green Industry and Innovation: Mass Timber

Engineered wood products like cross-laminated timber and other forms of mass timber provide a prime opportunity to diversify the American economy, improve forest management, and lower emissions while providing steady, family-sustaining employment for a skilled workforce.

A New Spin on Conservation Corps

A speaker from Green Forests Work discussed how native forests provide critical ecosystem services and processes, and GFW’s work restoring a forest-based economy in Appalachia.

Resilient Housing and Communities

Speakers discussed how nature-based solutions can be employed to improve community resilience and mitigate climate risks.

Coastal Resilience in the Southeast

Multiple speakers discussed how nature-based solutions are being deployed around the southeastern coast to help make communities more resilient to climate impacts. Examples of such solutions include wetlands, living shorelines, and coral reefs.

Coastal Resilience in the Great Lakes Region

This briefing featured nature-based solutions employed by Great Lakes tribes, along with green infrastructure being deployed in urban areas.

Nature-Based Resilience for Gulf Coast Communities

This briefing showcased nature-based solutions that support coastal resilience, such as wetlands restoration, as well as the “greening” of highways and other traditional gray infrastructure around the Gulf Coast.

Articles:

Oregon Lumber Company Showcases New Mass Timber Product, Invests in Sustainability

Made from wood, a renewable resource, mass timber lowers building-sector emissions and provides carbon storage. Further, as mass timber products are often created from small-diameter trees or even diseased trees, they provide an economic incentive to remove less valuable (and often more flammable) wood from forest areas, reducing wildfire risks.

New Act Highlights Little-Known Pathway to Absorb Carbon Emissions

The Blue Carbon for Our Planet Act (H.R.5589/S.3939) draws attention to a little-known pathway to absorb carbon emissions: coastal wetland ecosystems that act as carbon sinks, or “blue carbon” ecosystems.

How do Congressional Budget Office Scores Impact Climate Policy?

Just as it neglects to fully consider the social cost of carbon, the Congressional Budget Office, which evaluates the budgetary and economic impacts of proposed legislation, rarely considers co-benefits. For example, nature-based solutions can provide wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration while reducing storm impacts.

Nature-base Recommendations in the Climate Crisis Report

On June 30, 2020, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released its majority staff report: Solving the Climate Crisis. The report aligns with EESI’s suggestion to promote nature-based solutions, referred to as natural climate solutions in the report.

What Could Conservative Climate Action Look Like?

Nature-based solutions are included in one pillar of the American Climate Contract, a framework for GOP climate action. This article covers a roundtable during which four Republican Members of Congress discussed the contract.

Living Shorelines Protect Coasts but Better Permitting Regulations Are Needed

In the United States, each coastal state is at a different stage of revising permitting regulations to be more inclusive of sustainable shoreline projects. Historically, state and federal governments have incentivized ‘hard’ structural shoreline protection strategies over living shoreline approaches.

House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis Finds Common Ground on Nature-Based Solutions

The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis held a hearing, Solving the Climate Crisis: Natural Solutions to Cutting Pollution and Building Resilience, which focused on using nature to mitigate, adapt, and increase resilience to climate change.

Author: Amber Todoroff