About: At the heart of the Paris Agreement, each country’s efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions are communicated as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). A significant number of NDCs rely on natural climate solutions to reduce emissions in order to meet the Paris Agreement commitments. Natural climate solutions, more broadly known as nature-based solutions, are under increasing scrutiny in terms of scalability, permanence, and verification, and overemphasis of their benefits risks delaying progress on cutting fossil fuel emissions. Conversely, nature-based solutions can have positive outcomes for local livelihoods, biodiversity, hydrology – and therefore water security – and other ecosystem services. They can address both climate mitigation and adaptation, and align with several of the SDGs. The diverse panel will address the social and economic challenges of facilitating nature-based solutions at a community-level, of measuring their success with high-quality and trustable data, and the opportunities they present in supporting sustainable futures. The learning from the session will be captured as a discussion summary made public on the AIMES website, and will help shape a subsequent workshop activity for modellers: ‘natural climate solutions for carbon dioxide removal for assessing climate scenarios’, including coastal perspectives. It will be led by AIMES with cross-cutting relevance for other Future Earth network collaboration and participation that is highly policy-relevant.