The Earth’s carbon cycle is a complex system that has been in balance for a long time before human industrial activity began to disrupt it. This natural system regulates the flow of carbon between the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil, and the biosphere. For most of Earth’s recent history, the planet has maintained a relatively stable climate, allowing life to flourish. But since the onset of the fossil-fuel age, we have been injecting vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere at a rate far beyond what natural systems can absorb. The result has been a buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, rising temperatures, and cascading impacts on ecosystems, weather systems, and sea levels.
To restore this balance, we need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions while also enhancing carbon sequestration through natural and technological means. But conventional economic and political frameworks have failed to incentivize this transition at the scale and speed required. This is why we must now look beyond traditional tools and consider radical innovations in both finance and climate intervention.
The Promise of the Global Carbon Reward
One of the most visionary proposals for addressing this crisis is the Global Carbon Reward (GCR), a concept developed by Dr. Delton Chen. Between 2015 and 2019, I had the opportunity to work with Delton and co-author Joel van der Beek on the foundational papers that introduced this idea. Our work, subsequently cited by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel The Ministry for the Future, proposed a global incentive system to reward verifiable carbon mitigation.
At the heart of the GCR is the Carbon Coin—a form of money issued not for producing goods or services, but for removing or avoiding greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than punishing carbon polluters through taxes or cap-and-trade schemes, the GCR would pay carbon savers. The concept is funded by “Carbon Quantitative Easing” (CQE), in which central banks create money to buy Carbon Coins from verified mitigation providers. This introduces a direct, transparent economic incentive for carbon removal and sustainable practices.
Delton’s work received accolades from institutions like MIT’s Climate CoLab and has gained increasing attention from climate economists and systems theorists. The idea is bold: transform the financial system itself to align with the regeneration of the biosphere. Instead of extracting value from nature, we would reward those who restore and protect it.
Despite its promise, the GCR has yet to be adopted at scale. The barriers are not technical but political and institutional. Financial conservatism, entrenched fossil fuel interests, and the inertia of existing economic paradigms have slowed progress. Governments continue to subsidize carbon-intensive industries while carbon prices remain too low to drive deep transformation. Without bold action, the GCR and other innovative proposals remain hypothetical.
Geoengineering as a Last Resort?
Dr. Mike MacCracken, a pioneering climate physicist whose decades of public service and scientific leadership helped shape the US Global Change Research Program, argues that the challenge before us demands both deep emissions cuts and the willingness to explore climate intervention tools that many find uncomfortable to even consider. These include solar radiation management (SRM)—a form of geoengineering that seeks to reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight to cool the planet.
Because the needed emissions reductions and removals are not occurring fast enough, MacCracken and other scientists have argued that we must begin seriously researching SRM and other geoengineering approaches.
In interviews and writings, Dr. MacCracken emphasizes that while geoengineering is controversial and carries significant risks, it may be necessary to reduce the rate of warming in the near term, buying time for carbon removal strategies like the GCR to take hold. He warns that stabilizing global temperatures at 2.5 to 3°C above preindustrial levels is not viable; we are on a dangerous path toward ecological breakdown, and all serious options must be considered.
SRM is not a substitute for emissions reduction. It does not address ocean acidification or remove carbon from the atmosphere. However, in a world where mitigation is stalling and tipping points are looming, it may be the least bad option. The key is to approach such interventions with humility, transparency, and global cooperation.
A Systems-Based Approach to Climate Restoration
What unites proposals like the Global Carbon Reward and the cautious exploration of geoengineering is the recognition that we need a new systems paradigm—one that values planetary health and long-term human flourishing over short-term profit. This means redesigning our economic frameworks, rethinking what we reward, and aligning human activity with the Earth’s capacity to sustain life.
We have the knowledge. We have the tools. What we lack is the courage and coordination to act. The carbon balance will not be restored through incremental adjustments to a broken system. It requires a transformation as radical as any scientific revolution—a shift not only in policy, but in worldview.
We must reward what restores, and refuse to profit from what destroys. We must learn to see the Earth not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living system to be healed.
Only then can we hope to restore the carbon balance—and with it, the future of life on Earth.
Can We Count On Nature-Based Climate Solutions?
In their “Global analysis of constraints to natural climate solution implementation,” Hilary Brumberg and her colleagues conducted a systematic review of recent peer-reviewed literature: from 1,821 papers, they identified 352 that provided 2,480 observations of 39 unique constraints from 135 countries. [1]
The Brumberg et al. paper is the first to map—country‑by‑country and pathway‑by‑pathway—the barriers that stall Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) such as forest protection, re‑wetting peatlands, agro‑forestry, or coastal‑wetland restoration. From 352 peer‑reviewed sources, they classify four broad constraint types—economic, informational (know‑how & monitoring), governance/political, and socio‑cultural—and show that every nation faces all four, but in very different mixes. Globally, the most cited roadblock is a lack of finance, followed by knowledge gaps, weak policy enforcement, and local distrust or equity concerns. Wetland projects hit information barriers hardest, reforestation hits equity worries (land & food security), while existing‑forest protection is hobbled by enforcement failures.
Overcoming the Barriers to Nature-Based Solutions
If nature-based solutions hold such promise, why are they not already transforming our landscapes at scale? The answer is not a lack of ideas, but a tangle of barriers—financial, technical, institutional, and social—that prevent communities from realizing their full potential. Each of these obstacles, however, comes with its own set of practical pathways forward.
Finance gaps remain the most obvious obstacle. Restoration projects demand long horizons, but capital markets are notoriously short-sighted. Investors want quick returns; ecosystems take decades to heal. Bridging this mismatch requires new financial tools that spread risk and extend patience. We already see glimpses of what’s possible: blended public–private funds, like Tanzania’s peatland initiative, channel early risk capital into projects that would otherwise struggle to secure backing. Sovereign “nature performance bonds” offer another pathway, tying debt relief to verifiable gains in carbon storage and biodiversity. And perhaps the most powerful lever of all would be to redirect the staggering $600 billion a year in harmful agricultural and forestry subsidies toward regenerative practices that heal, rather than deplete, our natural wealth.
Information is the second barrier. Data is power, and too often it is concentrated in the hands of distant experts rather than local stewards. Farmers, fishers, and community cooperatives need the ability to measure, monitor, and manage their lands with precision. That means democratizing access to the tools of science: open-source remote sensing platforms, low-cost soil-carbon sensors, and eDNA kits that allow communities to map biodiversity with their own hands. But technology alone is not enough. Knowledge must be cultivated alongside it. Every significant grant for restoration or agroforestry should include funding for extension and training, so that those who live on the land can translate raw data into living, adaptive management.
Governance presents the third barrier. Without secure rights, local people lack both the authority and the incentive to protect ecosystems. Indigenous co-management, in fact, remains one of the cheapest and most effective strategies for keeping carbon in the ground. At the national level, governments can embed nature-based solutions into their climate pledges—Nationally Determined Contributions—but words on paper mean little without teeth. Brazil’s “Amazon Fund 2.0,” which disburses payments only when results are verified, hints at the kind of accountability the world must embrace.
The fourth barrier is equity. Restoration will never scale if it forces smallholders to choose between long-term planetary benefits and the daily struggle to feed their families. Solutions must be designed to deliver livelihood benefits from the start. That could mean “cash-crop plus carbon” mosaics—shade trees interplanted with coffee or cocoa, silvopasture that enhances livestock productivity, or mangrove-aquaculture systems that provide fish today while sequestering carbon for decades. Payments for ecosystem services must also be fair, reflecting true opportunity costs and delivered in advance of carbon delivery, so that farmers are not left carrying risks they cannot afford.
Finally, there is the challenge of coordination. Even the most committed land steward can be overwhelmed by the maze of permits, financing requirements, and technical standards. When each community must reinvent the wheel, progress stalls. The alternative is to establish implementation accelerators at the watershed or bioregional scale—coalitions that bring together governments, Indigenous authorities, land trusts, insurers, and agricultural suppliers to streamline the process. Such hubs could bundle capital, knowledge, and permitting, enabling each village or landowner to focus less on bureaucracy and more on regeneration.
Taken together, these measures reveal that the barriers to scaling nature-based solutions are formidable but not insurmountable. What they demand is imagination, alignment, and the courage to redesign the systems—financial, informational, political, and social—that currently lock us into decline. If we can summon that courage, we may yet turn these obstacles into stepping stones on the path to restoring Earth’s carbon balance.
What the Findings Mean for Expectations
When we step back from the numbers, the first lesson is sobering but clarifying: the biophysical potential of nature-based solutions is not the same as near-term delivery. For years, advocates have circulated the hopeful headline that forests, soils, wetlands, and other natural systems could provide “one-third of the mitigation needed by 2030.” That claim remains scientifically defensible. Yet, as Brumberg and colleagues remind us, the effective potential is lower—at least until we confront the knot of interlocking constraints that slow real-world implementation.
Finance emerges as the first unlock. Money alone cannot dissolve every barrier, but it is the lever that shifts them all—data collection, governance, equity, and enforcement. From the track record of existing portfolios, a rule of thumb has emerged: simply bridging the funding gap requires on the order of ten to twelve dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent. Without that baseline commitment, nothing else can follow.
On the ground, however, the constraints are never identical. In the peatlands of Kalimantan, for example, villagers walk across spongy soils that once held water year-round. Drained for agriculture, the peat now smolders in dry seasons, releasing clouds of carbon and smoke. Here, the binding constraint is not labor or willpower, but proof: satellites must be able to confirm that groundwater levels have risen and fires are less likely. Only then can carbon credits flow.
Contrast that with the rolling farms of Appalachia, where landowners are willing to plant riparian buffers—rows of trees along streams that filter runoff and store carbon. The obstacle here is not measurement but bureaucracy: whether farmers can “stack” different federal and state incentives without losing one to gain another.
Or travel to western Kenya, where women’s cooperatives are experimenting with agroforestry—maize interplanted with fast-growing acacias. The trees enrich soils and offer fuelwood, but without secure land rights, women risk losing the very carbon benefits they have nurtured. The constraint here is tenure, not technology.
These stories remind us that local context dictates which lever matters most. What unlocks mitigation in one region may barely register in another.
Perhaps the most consequential insight is that monitoring credibility is the make-or-break issue for carbon markets. Without transparent and robust systems for measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), scaling uncertain pathways could erode trust in all natural climate solutions. The lesson here is uncompromising: open-data platforms and independent third-party audits must become standard costs of doing business, not optional extras.
And yet, carbon is never the whole story. Projects endure because of their co-benefits: resilience to floods, biodiversity gains, and diversified livelihoods. After a cyclone, a coastal community may care less about the value of carbon credits than about how replanted mangroves blunted the storm surge. Funding schemes should pay for such benefits explicitly, rather than treating them as pleasant but incidental side effects.
A Realistic Support Horizon
The pathway forward unfolds in stages.
- 2025–2030 will be the “unblocking decade.” At least ten percent of global climate finance—around sixty-five billion dollars a year—should be redirected toward early-stage, grant-style support for nature-based projects. Priority must go to initiatives that simultaneously tackle finance and information gaps, the twin bottlenecks that stall so many promising ideas.
- 2030–2040 can become the “scaling decade.” By then, the costs of monitoring will have fallen, and legal frameworks will have matured. Under these conditions, blended-finance mechanisms could credibly deliver two to three gigatonnes of carbon mitigation per year. That is roughly half the oft-cited technical ceiling—but still a climate wedge comparable in scale to global heavy-industry decarbonization.
- Beyond 2040 lies the “maintenance era.” By then, the steep curve of carbon mitigation will have flattened. The value of nature-based solutions will shift toward adaptation, water security, and biodiversity services. Stewardship funding will matter more than offsets: trust funds, green sovereign wealth vehicles, and other long-term instruments designed not just to plant trees but to keep ecosystems thriving across generations.
The Bottom Line
The latest evidence does not suggest that nature-based climate solutions are a mirage. It suggests they are political-economic projects first, ecological-technical projects second. Their success depends on matching finance with credible data, pairing protection with prosperity for local people, and embedding enforcement in law. Otherwise, the large theoretical wedge they represent will remain trapped on paper.
This recognition does not weaken the case for action; it broadens it. For if nature alone cannot shoulder the burden, then we must grapple with the credibility of other options—mechanical carbon capture, emissions reductions far steeper than current politics allow, and yes, the controversial prospect of geoengineering. The case for exploring solar radiation management or other interventions grows stronger, not weaker, in light of these obstacles. Those who oppose such measures must answer a hard question: how else, given the limits of natural systems and our own political will, do we intend to stabilize the climate?
We should harbor no illusions. Geoengineering will entail mistakes, some of them grave. But then, we have already been conducting an uncontrolled planetary experiment for more than a century—industrial development and technological acceleration with no intention of managing the Earth. If the Anthropocene has taught us anything, it is that unintentional experiments can be just as dangerous as deliberate ones. The challenge before us is to act with foresight, humility, and resolve, choosing our interventions carefully rather than stumbling into them blindly.
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[1] Hillary Brumberg, Margaret Hegwood, Waverly Eichhorst, Anna LoPresti, James T Erbaugh, Timm Kroeger, Global analysis of constraints to natural climate solution implementation, PNAS Nexus, Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2025, pgaf173, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf173