Planting trees in urban environments cools the air and provides shade, helping reduce risks to communities during heatwaves. Maintaining lower-severity, managed fires in forests means less chance of catastrophic wildfires. How NCS Pathways Support Community Resilienceįorests can improve soil water retention and flow regulation, reducing the risks of flooding or droughts. For example, healthy coral reefs can reduce the impacts of damaging storm surges, protecting infrastructure and more than 200 million people along coastlines globally. An additional benefit of natural climate solutions: They help make communities more resilient. In Belize, Guatemala and Mexico tropical forest protection is helping secure critical habitat for wildlife like jaguar.Īs climate change exacerbates the effects of storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and other natural disasters the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world are increasingly at risk. Managing fire to mimic historical fire regimes in forests or planting wildlife corridors and buffer areas are other NCS activities that enhance biodiversity conservation. For example, in managed forests, reducing the impacts of logging or extending harvest rotations help minimize the impacts to critical wildlife habitat or food sources. Maintaining healthy forests is essential for conserving biodiversity, plain and simple. Planting trees in croplands can provide habitat for species and support ecosystem connectivity, and improved grazing management reduces disturbance to plant-insect interactions. Fertilizer management in agricultural settings supports fish species richness and abundance by reducing nutrient runoff into waterways. Protecting grasslands sustains important habitat for nesting and foraging birds. Protecting or restoring peatlands ensures the survival of diverse ecological communities, including many distinctive insects. Protecting or restoring coastal wetlands maintains wildlife habitat, including nurseries for commercially important fish and shrimp. It also creates ecosystem connectivity, or wildlife corridors-stretches of habitat that allow species to move around safely. For example, nature provides sources of food and shelter for mammals, birds, and insects. But strategies to protect, manage and restore critical ecosystems not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they also promote biodiversity. As a result, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is rising.Deforestation, ecosystem degradation, and unsustainable production practices are threatening biological diversity worldwide. Deforestation is depleting Earth’s supply of carbon sinks. People are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere by using fossil fuels and maintaining large livestock operations. However, the carbon cycle is changing because of human activity. Ideally, the carbon cycle would keep Earth’s carbon concentrations in balance, moving the carbon from place to place and keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide levels steady. These processes that release carbon into the atmosphere are known as carbon sources. Raising cattle for food also releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. Any process that uses fossil fuels-such as burning coal to make electricity-releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. Some processes release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they absorb. The ocean is another example of a carbon sink, absorbing a large amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They continually take carbon out of the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. Forests are typically carbon sinks, places that absorb more carbon than they release. When plants die, the carbon goes into the soil, and microbes can release the carbon back into the atmosphere through decomposition. As plants photosynthesize, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. For example, carbon continually flows in and out of the atmosphere and also living things. The carbon cycle describes the flow of carbon between each of these places. It is also stored in places like the ocean, rocks, fossil fuels, and plants. Carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, is even a part of the air we breathe. Carbon makes up the fats and carbohydrates of our food and is part of the molecules, like DNA and protein, that make up our bodies. Carbon is an element that is essential to all life on Earth.
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