By Justine Calma , a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hel

What is ‘nature-based carbon removal’ and is it any better than carbon offsets?

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2024-06-09 14:30:04

By Justine Calma , a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.

Big tech companies are increasingly turning to nature to do the dirty work of cleaning up their greenhouse gas emissions. The idea is to use plants and ecosystems that naturally absorb CO2 to compensate for industry pollution, a tactic brands have come to call “nature-based carbon removal.”

At first glance, these attempts sound a lot like carbon offset projects that have a checkered past. For decades, companies have purchased credits from offset projects to try to cancel out some portion of their carbon footprint, typically by planting trees, restoring or protecting ecosystems that sequester CO2 through photosynthesis.

It all sounds green and dandy on paper. But studies have shown that this strategy repeatedly fails to have any meaningful impact on climate change and can even lead to more environmental harm. It’s very difficult to measure how much CO2 is stored in nature through processes that can easily be reversed, releasing the greenhouse gas again to heat the planet. Is all this talk of nature-based carbon removal just a rebranding of carbon offset projects that have gotten a bad rap?