Why Nature Belongs in Net Zero

The SBTi has just rewritten the rules on carbon removals. Here is what it means for nature-based solutions, and why they should be part of the answer rather than a footnote to it.

For most of the last decade, the voluntary carbon market lived under a quiet suspicion. Were credits a genuine climate tool, or a way for companies to buy their way out of doing the hard work? The Science Based Targets initiative, the body that validates the net-zero targets of several thousand of the world's largest corporates, had long held a firm line: credits could not be counted toward a company's emissions reduction targets. That line gave the market its credibility and, at the same time, its ceiling.

In June 2026 the SBTi published Version 2.0 of its Corporate Net-Zero Standard. The headline rule did not move. Credits still cannot offset a reduction target. But almost everything around that rule changed, and the change reshapes the market for high-quality removals in a way that nature-based solutions cannot afford to misread.

This piece is about that shift, and about a harder argument underneath it: that nature, mangroves in particular, belongs at the center of corporate net-zero strategies, not at their margins.

What actually changed

The old Standard treated action beyond a company's own value chain as a virtue. It encouraged companies to do more, without specifying what, how much, or by when. The new Standard replaces that soft encouragement with a structure it calls Ongoing Emissions Responsibility, and that structure has dates and percentages attached.

It unfolds in three phases:

Phase one, now: contribute while you decarbonize.

From the moment a company sets a target, it is asked to take responsibility for the emissions it is still producing while it works its way down. The Standard creates a public recognition program with three levels. At the Engaged level, a company covers at least 1% of its total ongoing scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. At Advanced, it covers 10%, including all of its scope 1 and 2, with a reference budget of $20 per tonne. At Leadership, it covers 100% of ongoing emissions at a budget of $80 per tonne, and retires credits of equal volume.

Two details matter here. First, the base is ongoing emissions, the company's whole live inventory, not some small leftover figure. Second, participation is displayed publicly, and a company that opts out has to justify the decision to the SBTi. This is not a quiet box to leave unticked.

Phase two, from 2035: removals become mandatory.

This is the part the market will remember. From 2035, large companies must support carbon removals equal to at least 1% of their ongoing scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, rising in a straight line to 100% by their net-zero year and no later than 2050. Not a recommendation. A requirement, on a published schedule.

The figure that catches people out is the base. One percent of ongoing emissions is one percent of everything a company still emits, climbing every year, not one percent of the slim residual that remains at the very end. Between 2035 and roughly 2050, the volume of removals corporates are obliged to buy is a rising share of their full footprint. The word residual makes the obligation sound small. The arithmetic says otherwise.

Phase three, the net-zero year: neutralization.

At its net-zero year and every year after, a company must neutralize all of its residual emissions with removals. Here the Standard leans toward long-lived storage, the geological-grade kind measured in centuries to millennia, for the carbon that is hardest to abate. As drafted, that pushes shorter-lived biological removals out of the final neutralization role. We will come back to this, because it is the single most important open question for nature.

Why this is the strongest demand signal since Paris

Step back and the significance is hard to overstate. The largest corporate climate framework in the world has moved from tolerating credits to requiring removals, and it has done so with numbers, dates, and public accountability. Demand for high-integrity removals is no longer a matter of corporate goodwill that rises and falls with budgets and news cycles. For thousands of companies it is becoming a scheduled obligation.

Three features make the signal especially strong. The Standard puts public price anchors into print: $20 per tonne at Advanced, $80 at Leadership. These are contribution budgets rather than credit prices, but they set a reference for what serious corporate climate action is expected to cost. It also closes an escape route: companies that miss their targets are recommended to buy removals anyway, which means underperformance itself now generates demand. And it ties everything to a public dashboard, so the reputational cost of doing nothing is visible to customers, investors, and regulators alike.

Where nature-based solutions stand

For anyone building nature-based supply, the new Standard is both an invitation and a warning.

The invitation.

The Standard names activities that restore, protect, or enhance natural carbon sinks as eligible climate contributions. Restoration removals, the kind a mangrove project produces, are eligible for the contribution phase now and for the mandatory short-lived removal allowance after 2035. The restoration model is not tolerated at the edge of the framework. It is written into it.

Just as important, the Standard sets a high bar for integrity, and that bar favors serious developers. Every supported activity has to clear documented due diligence, do-no-harm safeguards for human rights and biodiversity, the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, conservative and independently assured quantification, project-level additionality, reversal-risk safeguards, and annual transparency including how benefits are shared with communities. That list reads almost exactly like the due diligence a credible institutional investor already demands. For projects built to that standard, quality stops being overhead and becomes the product. For projects that are not, the new rules are an existential filter.

The warning.

Mangrove removals are classified as short-lived under the Standard's durability definitions, the category for biological storage that holds carbon for decades to centuries rather than millennia. From 2035 a growing share of removals must be long-lived, and final neutralization of residual carbon, as currently drafted, requires long-lived removals. Read literally, that would push nature out of the endgame and hand the highest-value part of the market to engineered, geological-grade storage.

But the Standard does not close the door. The SBTi has opened a Call for Evidence on whether shorter-lived removals can deliver climate-equivalent permanence through contractual, financial, or stewardship mechanisms. In plain terms: can a well-designed mangrove project, with replanting obligations, insurance, and buffer reserves, offer permanence as credible as a tank of mineralized CO2? That consultation is the swing factor for the entire nature-based sector.

Why nature should be part of the solution

It would be easy to read the durability schedule as a verdict against nature. That would be a mistake, for three reasons.

First, the physics of the next two decades. The mandatory removal ramp begins in 2035 and is dominated by short-lived removals for years. Engineered removal at the scale the world will need does not yet exist at acceptable cost. Nature-based removals are the only option that can be deployed at scale, now, against an obligation that is already written down. A net-zero transition that waits for technology to mature will miss its own schedule.

Second, permanence is a design problem, not an inherent flaw, and mangroves are unusually well suited to solving it. The standard objection to biological storage is reversal: a fire, a storm, a falling tree. But mangroves hold most of their carbon not in the standing trees, where land-based forests keep theirs, but locked in waterlogged coastal sediment beneath them. A mangrove that falls into the water does not burn and does not release its carbon to the atmosphere; the carbon stays buried in oxygen-poor mud where it can remain for hundreds, even thousands, of years. There is no fire risk in a flooded forest. Left undisturbed, a restored mangrove is one of the most durable carbon stores in nature. The remaining risks, a change in land use or coastal development, are managed in serious projects through buffer pools that set aside a share of credits against loss, through insurance, and through long-term community stewardship agreements. We go one step further: converting a blue carbon project into a protected reserve at the end of the crediting period locks the storage in permanently, by design. The question the SBTi is now asking is precisely whether these mechanisms add up to climate-equivalent permanence. For well-built mangrove projects, the honest answer is that they do.

Third, and this is what engineered removal can never replicate, nature pays dividends that carbon accounting does not capture. A restored mangrove coast is not only a carbon sink. It is a fishery, a storm barrier protecting communities behind it, a nursery for biodiversity, and a source of local livelihoods. A direct-air-capture facility removes a tonne of carbon and nothing else. A hectare of restored mangrove removes carbon and, at the same time, protects a village, feeds a fishery, and rebuilds an ecosystem. When a company chooses where to direct its removal budget, that difference is not sentimental. It is the difference between buying a single outcome and buying many.

What this means for corporate strategy

For a company reading the new Standard, the implication is a sequence, not a single decision. Contribute now, through the recognition program, using high-integrity credits including nature-based ones. Build removal portfolios before 2035, securing supply ahead of an obligation that ramps from one percent to one hundred. And lock in neutralization supply early, while watching the permanence consultation that will decide how large a role nature can play at the very end.

Forward purchase agreements fit this logic cleanly. Funding a project today, before its credits exist, qualifies as eligible climate action under the contribution budgets, and the credits delivered later feed the removal requirements of future cycles. The companies that move early will secure the best supply at the best terms. The ones that wait will be buying into a market the Standard itself has guaranteed will be crowded.

The bottom line

The SBTi did not create the market for nature-based removals. It did something more durable: it turned that market into an obligation for the world's largest emitters, and it wrote the schedule down. From 2035, removals are no longer a corporate virtue. They are a corporate requirement.

Whether nature keeps its seat at the table through the net-zero year depends on a consultation now underway, and on whether developers can prove that a living, restored ecosystem can hold its carbon as credibly as a sealed geological store. We believe it can, and we believe the case for nature rests on something the accounting still struggles to price: that the same tonne of carbon, removed by a mangrove rather than a machine, also rebuilds a coastline, a fishery, and a community.

The demand curve is now written down. The question is whether we build the supply to meet it with solutions that do more than one thing at a time.

Apolownia develops high-integrity blue carbon projects, restoring mangrove ecosystems that remove carbon while protecting coastlines and communities.