Keeling Curve

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The science is clear: to secure a stable and safe climate we must at minimum cut emissions in half by 2030 and begin removing past climate pollution already in the atmosphere. Natural carbon sequestration (NCS) is the only solution that can cost-effectively draw down previous emissions at scale this decade while also ensuring climate justice and equity, increasing resilience to extremes, and providing multiple benefits for our health, environment, and economy. And California is key because as goes California, so goes the world on climate policy.

While there have been significant policy advances in California to cut emissions and deploy clean energy, the role of natural carbon sequestration has been greatly undervalued. Fortunately, in September 2022, Governor Newsom signed into law new state legislation (AB 1757) based on a bill sponsored by The Climate Center with the Carbon Cycle Institute, California Association of Resource Conservation Districts (CARCD), and Pew Charitable Trusts, and supported by over 80 organizations. This law requires state agencies to set ambitious targets and implementation strategies for NCS and emission reductions on natural and working lands (NWL) by 2030, 2038 and 2045. It also established an Expert Advisory Committee (EAC). 

Ensuring that bold, science-based targets are established and implemented requires a strong, unified and coordinated advocacy effort from organizations, working closely with the EAC and state decision makers. Because the expertise of these NGOs varies widely – from forestry to urban greening, agriculture, wetlands and beyond – it is essential to engage in a collaborative process to build a powerful, unified voice to achieve our urgent policy goals.

Our solution is to convene an ongoing coalition of NWL advocates to work together and ensure the boldest possible implementation of AB 1757 for natural climate solutions that are commensurate with the worsening climate crisis. Together, we will strengthen our collective power to effectively shape and enact policies that ensure California’s NWL are transformed from net carbon emitters to net carbon sinks, along with many other co-benefits, catalyzing other states and the nation to take similar actions.

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Natural Carbon Sequestration is a core pillar of our Climate-Safe California Campaign that was launched in 2019. We initially focused on research, publications, and partnership building and outreach, laying the foundation for the state to take leadership on NCS at the speed and scale commensurate with the climate crisis. To date, we have published three op-eds, hosted five webinars on NCS, and published the report Setting an Ambitious Sequestration Goal for California’s Working Lands: Analysis and Recommendations for Net Negative Emissions by 2030. In addition, we published the Carbon Capture and Storage Policy Guidance (March 2022) to help policymakers and our communities distinguish between engineered and natural carbon removal solutions. Last summer, The Climate Center hired a full-time Natural Sequestration Initiative Manager to expand our NCS program and advance our policy goals. Our work is now shifting from research and education to implementation and scaling up programs. In order to ensure the state is leveraging the potential of its NWL, continued coordinated advocacy from NGOs is necessary.

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Our project is fundamentally a policy advocacy campaign. In all of our advocacy, we work hard to center the voices and needs of disadvantaged and underrepresented communities. Climate Justice is one of our three Guiding Principles and we weave it into everything we do.

The Climate Center works in coalition with groups across the state and believes partnerships with justice- and community-focused organizations are essential to securing a climate-safe future for all. Relationships with such organizations must not be symbolic or transactional but deep and reciprocal. Building these ties, and correcting a historic divide within California‚ environmental movement, takes time, but we remain more committed than ever to this task. For example, we convene a Microgrid Equity Coalition that meets weekly and together secured $200 million for clean energy microgrids in low-income communities in 2021. The Climate Center also works with board volunteers and consultants to deepen our staff‚ education on diversity, equity, and inclusion. This involves regular sessions together discussing readings, self-reflecting, asking hard questions, engaging in dialogue, and examining assumptions. As we grow as individuals and as an organization, we continue to engage in the shared work of rolling back the climate crisis and creating a more vibrant, equitable, and healthy society.

Our nature-based sequestration initiative aims to empower disadvantaged groups on multiple fronts. First, our approach to working lands involves developing policies that will provide technical resources and support to implement techniques that are regenerative and holistic. These techniques displace the extractive, polluting, degrading practices that are dominant in conventional agriculture and that have been the source of severe air and water quality pollution negatively impacting neighboring communities, primarily communities of color and lower income communities, for decades. Swapping out these practices will result in tangible public health improvements in these frontline communities.

Second, partnership with organizations that represent disadvantaged groups is essential to the success of this project. We are involved in numerous statewide coalitions that engage on this topic and related ones. We have commenced initial engagement with justice-focused groups about our sequestration report and goals. 

Third, any policy solution we design must incorporate environmental justice (EJ) insights and input from the start. As we have known from our clean energy efforts, EJ groups need to be at the table in the design, planning, advocacy, and implementation of any policy around working lands. We will not consider our campaign successful without the involvement and perspectives of groups who can speak from their own experience about the importance of natural sequestration and take an active role in designing policy solutions that work for their communities.

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