Working With Nature to Reduce the Impacts of Climate Change

Climate change is making extreme climate events, such as droughts and floods, more severe all over the world. Working with nature could help reduce or completely remove these dangerous impacts of climate change. We developed a way to measure how much working with nature can reduce the impacts of extreme drought on society. We applied it to one of the worst water crises experienced by a city: the Cape Town day zero drought, in which the taps of city dwellers almost ran dry. We found that clearing thirsty, non-native trees from the mountains that provide the city’s water could have allowed more water to flow through rivers into the city’s dams. But it would not have removed the full climate change impact. This tells us that working with nature is important in the fight against climate change, but that other types of solutions are also needed to protect societies, too.