Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Natural climate solutions, or NCS, range from reforestation and agroforestry to wetland restoration, and have long been championed as low-cost, high-benefit pathways for reducing greenhouse gases. In theory, they could provide more than a third of the climate mitigation needed by 2030 to stay under 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) of warming above pre-industrial levels. But in practice, progress is stalling. A sweeping new study, led by Hilary Brumberg of the University of Colorado Boulder, U.S., reveals why. Drawing on 352 peer-reviewed papers from across 135 countries, researchers cataloged 2,480 documented barriers to implementing NCS. The obstacles aren’t ecological. Rather, they’re human: insufficient funding, patchy information, ineffective policies, and public skepticism. The result is a vast “implementation gap” between what is technically possible and what is politically, economically or socially feasible, the authors write. The analysis found that “lack of funding” was the most commonly cited constraint globally, identified in nearly half of all countries surveyed. Yet it rarely stood alone. Most regions face a tangle of interconnected hurdles. Constraints from different categories often co-occur, compounding difficulties: poor governance erodes trust; disinterest stems from unclear benefits; technical know-how is stymied by bureaucratic confusion. These patterns vary by region and type of intervention. Reforestation projects, for instance, face particularly high scrutiny over equity concerns, especially in the Global South, where land tenure insecurity and historical injustices run deep. Agroforestry and wetland restoration often struggle with…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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