Guest Post: Land Use at the Center of Climate Change Discussions

Climate issues and resultant discussions about these issues continue to be an important topic, especially as it pertains to land us. Land Trust Alliance president and CEO Andrew Bowman shares his thoughts on this important topic.

The headlines of prominent newspapers this week are focused on the report just released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about land use and climate change. The report confirms that, from a scientific standpoint, land conservation and management are central to how the world can mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts. All of us at the Land Trust Alliance hope that this report helps elevate land to the central place it deserves in policy debates about climate change.

While its overall findings may not be surprising to members of the land trust community, the report does make some key points that can inform our conservation work and advocacy efforts:

• • The report confirms the important role that natural climate solutions can play in mitigating climate change. But the report goes further and makes clear that, in order to protect the world’s food supply, we need to be careful to keep the natural in natural climate solutions by not going too far in pursuing large-scale bioenergy operations and afforestation, i.e., planting trees where they did not previously grow. Instead, we need to maintain our focus on protecting and restoring natural ecosystems consisting of native plants and animals.
  • The report also emphasizes how critical it is to shift to sustainable land management practices on the lands that provide our food and fiber. Land trusts can show the way here by using climate-smart practices as they steward the forests, grasslands, wetlands and agricultural soils under their management. To help with this effort, the Land Trust Alliance is exploring new ways for land trusts to tap into ecosystem services markets to get paid for implementing those practices, and we can also urge policymakers to direct funding to help defray these land management costs. Doing so is a wise investment.
  • Finally, the message from the report that is generating the most attention is that the world’s food supply is at great risk from climate change. This serves to demonstrate the value and importance of land trusts’ efforts to save our nation’s existing farms and ranches, and how policymakers should make greater resources available to advance this critical work.

This new report is sobering, but just like the recent U.N. report about the world’s biodiversity crisis, it makes clear the absolutely essential role that land conservation plays in addressing the world’s greatest environmental challenges. We can take comfort in knowing that we are in the right business at the right time — but it is our responsibility to take our work to new levels of scale, effectiveness and sustainability in a very short time.

Originally published on the LTA blog site.