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A strategic tool for deciding where limited time, money, and effort restore the most climate cooling.
The missing half of the story
The usual story is about greenhouse gases — reduce emissions, electrify, remove carbon. All necessary. But it leaves out something fundamental: the Earth's climate is also regulated by living systems.
Forests, wetlands, grasslands, and soils actively move heat and water — cooling the surface, forming clouds, generating rain, and moderating extremes. When they're degraded, heat intensifies and rainfall falters. Restoring them is one of the fastest levers we have.
The strategic question
Not every hectare matters equally. A restored tropical forest behaves nothing like temperate tree-planting; a wetland nothing like a dryland.
Some places are planetary cooling engines. Others stabilize whole regions. Others prove what's possible locally. The Cooling Leverage Index exists to tell them apart — so effort goes where nature cools the most.
What the CLI measures
How much heat an ecosystem moves skyward as water vapor.
Does it simply receive rain, or actively help generate it?
Watersheds, groundwater recharge, flood moderation, freshwater.
Nearness to irreversible collapse — weighted high, because prevention is high leverage.
How much it lowers land-surface temperature and shields communities.
Stewardship, community support, Indigenous leadership — cooling only counts if it lasts.
What we're finding
Highest leverage: tropical rainforests — the Amazon, the Congo Basin — and Southeast Asian peatlands, where restoring hydrology rapidly cuts fire risk and recovers cooling.
Regional stabilizers (cloud forests, the Sahel, Himalayan watersheds) score lower on planetary leverage but remain vital for resilience and demonstration.
An emerging framework: next we replace heuristic scores with satellite-derived evapotranspiration, land-surface temperature, and hydrological data — validated through case studies.
From "where nature matters" to "where your dollar cools"
The CLI says where nature matters most. Its companion, Cooling Return on Investment (C-ROI), helps answer where each dollar achieves the most cooling.
Alongside it sit companion measures — Biodiversity Integrity, Restoration Resilience, and Trigger Leverage — kept separate so the science stays clear while donors and practitioners get the fuller picture.
Rooted in Cool the Planet
The CLI grows out of Bio4Climate’s Cool the Planet work and the EcoRestoration Alliance’s Cooling the Climate Quickly paper — reaching the same conclusion from different directions.