Restoring nature’s climate-cooling systems
The Climate Cooling Initiative
A large-scale plan to protect, restore, and strengthen the living systems that cool our planet.
Bio4Climate is a founding partner of the initiative.
Our role
Our science, working at global scale
Since 2013, Bio4Climate has shared a simple idea: nature is climate. Forests, wetlands, soils, and water cycles don’t just store carbon. They move heat and water, form clouds, bring rain, and cool the land.
The Climate Cooling Initiative turns that idea into a global plan. As a founding partner, we bring our science, education, and community to the effort, alongside the EcoRestoration Alliance and partners around the world.
A global call to action
Why nature-based climate cooling matters
Earth’s living systems regulate climate in ways that go far beyond carbon. Protecting and restoring them, from our own backyards to the Amazon rainforest, strengthens the natural processes that cool and stabilize the climate.
Water cycles
Living systems move water and heat through the atmosphere.
Cooling now
Healthy ecosystems regulate climate every day.
Multiple benefits
Healthy ecosystems support biodiversity, livelihoods, and resilience.
More than carbon
Carbon matters enormously. But it’s not the whole climate story.
The urgent goal
Bend the warming curve
Cutting emissions remains essential. To bend the curve toward cooling, we also need to protect and restore the living systems that regulate Earth’s heat and water.
Warming
Emissions and the loss of natural cooling systems push temperatures up.
Slowing
Emissions cuts and restoration begin to slow the rate of warming.
Stabilization
Warming levels off as restoration takes hold at scale.
Cooling
Stronger natural climate regulation brings measurable declines in temperature.
Cooling Leverage Index
Where does nature cool the planet most?
Developed together by Bio4Climate and the EcoRestoration Alliance, the Cooling Leverage Index helps the initiative decide where limited time, money, and effort will restore the most cooling. It scores places across six dimensions.
Evapotranspiration
How much heat an ecosystem moves skyward as water vapor.
Rainfall and moisture recycling
Does it simply receive rain, or help generate it?
Hydrological importance
Watersheds, groundwater recharge, flood moderation, and freshwater.
Tipping-point proximity
How close it is to irreversible collapse. Prevention is high leverage.
Heat-risk reduction
How much it lowers land temperatures and shields communities.
Governance and durability
Stewardship, community support, and Indigenous leadership. Cooling only counts if it lasts.
Highest leverage so far: tropical rainforests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asian peatlands, where restoring water rapidly cuts fire risk and brings cooling back.
Rooted in our work
Built on Bio4Climate’s four climate keys
The Cooling Leverage Index grows out of our Cool the Planet work. Explore each key to see how nature cools.
What the initiative does
Connecting the work already underway
Important restoration work is happening around the world. The initiative exists to connect it, strengthen it, and scale its cooling impact.
Connect
Bring together people, knowledge, tools, and projects that too often work separately.
Accelerate
Help promising approaches move from science and demonstration to implementation at scale.
Demonstrate
Build the measurement and evidence to show real climate-cooling results.
Go deeper
Explore the science on Bio4Climate
How nature cools
Watch and listen
Cooling the climate will take all of us
Whether you bring science, land, projects, policy, investment, or the power of your community, there’s a role for you.
The Climate Cooling Initiative is a fiscally sponsored project of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.