Mother Earth has a Fever: One Remedy is Nature-based Solutions

A healthy planet is a healthy world. Picture this, a helpful friend we all love has an illness, and that illness causes a temperature. After years of providing us with life-giving nourishment and resources, Mother Earth’s health is no longer stable. Her tears are devastating floods and her fever is signalled through the oppressive heat waves. It’s no surprise that to remedy the scale of the problem requires a different kind of recovery effort.

One such effort is Nature-based Solutions, a term first coined in 2009 by the World Bank and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. According to the UNFCCC (2022) Nature-based Solutions involve “Actions that protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems, that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits”.

Dr Raksha Pandya-Wood

At the Conference of Parties (COP29) which ended last Friday, in Azerbaijan, a coalition of over 100 expert stakeholders, organisations and indigenous people agreed that an impressive one third of climate mitigation can be achieved through protecting and restoring nature. In other words, letting our Mother Earth ‘rest and restore’ without further abuse. Nature is powerful. Whilst it is no longer possible to bring back extinct species, we can ‘keep the fever down’.

Despite being coined in 2009, we are only finally taking the approach to Nature-based Solutions seriously. So how does it work? Nature’s amazing ecosystems, I will call these ‘vitamins’, protect our planet. Some of the simplest, most powerful mechanisms that regulate our planet are found in our forests, our peatlands and our corals. Our forests are like sponges of carbon, they suck up the unclean air and replenish it with clean oxygenated air. The trees protect us from erosion, floods and landslides and have symbiotically helped our animal kingdom. 75 percent of the world’s bird species live in the forest and 68 percent of the world’s mammals live there. But trees are being cut down at a mass scale.

There are carbon storages in our coral, but coral reefs are being threatened too. They are turning pale and ‘jaundiced’ due to rising sea temperatures, water pollution and marine life habitat destruction. With all of these natural solutions or ‘vitamins’ being extracted, our seas are expanding because everything everywhere is getting hotter and its impact is felt most in coastal low lying countries like Fiji and Indonesia, which are literally drowning.

Peatlands and mangroves are another source of carbon storage. When we cut these down, we are opening up enormous amounts of carbon that have been carefully put away by Mother Earth. In our analogy of a sickness, peatlands, forests and corals are like the ‘antioxidants’ that Mother Earth uses to protect herself (and us) from the raging ‘free radicals’.

The analogy of sickness provokes emotion and provides feelings of how to make Mother Earth ‘better’. The great thing about Nature-based Solutions is that climate change mitigation efforts can be found in our locality, when we look for them.

In the social sciences we look for answers in philosophy, sociology, psychology, we study and analyse how communities have the power to implement change. We know that people have agency and can provide their voice in different ways. Decision making and decision taking is ‘agency’. Agency can be an individual as well as collective.

Individual agency involves critical thinking about our own relationship with Mother Earth. For example, walking instead of taking the car, eating less meat and planting trees. We might choose to create green spaces and wild flowers to grow, so that the environment welcomes birds, bees and insects to return. Not only will pops of natural colour return in a growing grey of blocky landscape of rapid urbanisation, biodiversity and life will return.

Collective agency is also a powerful tool for action. Communities can share their unique knowledge about their local environment with each other and structure their collective ideas to improve their environment. Many people have traditional knowledge too and mixing these types of knowledge sources is an untapped resource. An example of this from Malaysia’s Sarawak region, the Rajang-Belawai-Paloh Delta Project is sound, because it aims to secure the long-term conservation of mangroves while co-designing sustainable economic activities that improve local livelihoods. Although still in the conceptual stage, it plans to include activities like sustainable shrimp production and ecotourism, directly involving local communities in conservation efforts.

Another example can be found in Lush Malaysia (a natural cosmetic business). Lush has started a conservation effort aiming to bring coral back by planting them back into the seabed using a coral frame in the absence of a coral reef. If this programme works, not only could sea life be enticed back if we stop overfishing and interfering with the fish, but years later, it could reduce the size of waves hitting the Asia Pacific, reducing the scale of sinking of entire countries that we are witnessing today.

Nature-based solutions are urgent. Working with what we have is our most powerful remedy. Although the prognosis of Mother Earth’s condition often looks bleak, the solutions we have available are effective, culturally appropriate and they offer opportunities to foster community ownership, placing communities in the driving seats for mass social change.

Just as when we are sick and need to monitor our health, there are no instant results and we need patience and the flexibility to adjust our care plan as needed. But if we get this right, mitigation will reduce or make the warming less severe. It is time for us to all do our small part.

Dr Raksha Pandya-Wood researches climate change communication in Southeast Asia at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub Malaysia Node, Monash University, Malaysia. Her research sits at the intersection of social sciences and health. She specialises in communities and co-production.