Some activities focused specifically on climate adaptation and mitigation have huge potential for expansion. Take natural climate solutions:
New research, led by The Nature Conservancy and 15 other institutions*, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that nature-based solutions can provide up to 37 percent of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperature increases under 2°C—30 percent more than previously estimated.
The framework of this study distills nature’s full climate potential into 20 mitigation pathways. The pathways span three biomes—forests, grasslands (including agricultural lands and rangelands) wetlands (including peatlands, seagrass and mangroves) and climate reduction practices based on conservation, restoration and land management.
This “restoration economy” already makes huge contributions and has huge potential for localized growth:
What has been almost entirely missing from this public debate is a detailed accounting of the economic output and jobs in the U.S. that are actually created through environmental conservation, restoration, and mitigation actions – the activities that are part of what we will call the “Restoration Economy.” This economy is comprised by the restoration sector, a variety of industries, including earth movers, plant nurseries, legal and planning practices, landscape architects, construction companies, and other firms that contribute to the ecological restoration process.
Federal appropriations for restoration-related programs can be conservatively estimated at $2.5 billion per year. Public and private investments linked to compensatory mitigation total an estimated $3.8 billion per year, and non-profit investments in natural resources and wildlife preservation and protection are estimated to exceed $4.3 billion annually. As demonstrated by the economic contributions literature, these large-scale restoration investments stimulate output and employment in a wide range of other industries, through supplier and household spending effects.