⁍ More than 560 companies, including tech titan Microsoft and retailer Walmart, urged governments to put in place stronger policies to protect nature and fight climate change.

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⁍ But biodiversity and climate experts warned that in the corporate rush to cut emissions to net zero, too many nature projects are proving ineffective or even counter-productive.

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⁍ They called for tighter standards to ensure investment goes to what actually works.

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– “There’s a romance around trees,” Oxford biodiversity scientist Nathalie Seddon says. “People like trees. You can physically plant them in the ground. … There’s a romance around trees.” That’s one reason more than 560 companies, including Walmart and Microsoft, are urging governments to protect nature and fight climate change with “nature-based solutions,” including tree-planting and restoring land to “what was there before human interventions,” Reuters reports. But Seddon, who directs the Nature-Based Solutions Initiative at Britain’s University of Oxford, warns that tree-planting is “hugely problematic” because the trees are often meant to be harvested and used, which release the carbon they store. Worsening forest fires, pest plagues, and simple neglect also can mean plantations do not last long enough to do the job promised. More than 200 tree-planting proposals are in hand, but “we’re up to our eyeballs in documentation” to make sure they’re legit, says Elizabeth Willmott, who leads Microsoft’s efforts to become “carbon negative” by 2030, adding that the company is “up to our eyeballs in documentation.” A rep for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit says more than half of the 30 biggest companies with net-zero emissions pledges are relying on nature-based solutions to meet them. But Seddon says judging how many are adhering to best practices and science is difficult. Failing to slash emissions would undermine both carbon offsetting efforts and the natural systems that act as planetary life support.