Improving climate and biodiversity outcomes through restoration of forest integrity

Abstract

Targeting degraded areas in forested landscapes for restoration could deliver rapid climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation, improve resilience of forested lands to future climate change, and potentially reduce the trade‐offs between nature recovery and agriculture. Although the importance of forest restoration for climate mitigation is acknowledged, current estimates of its climate mitigation potential may be underestimated because they focus predominantly on reforesting cleared areas. We built on recent analyses of forest integrity and unrealized forest biomass potential to examine the potential for restoring the integrity of degraded forests. There are over 1.5 billion ha of forests worldwide that retain 50–80% of their potential biomass. Prioritizing restoration in these areas could deliver rapid biodiversity and climate mitigation benefits, relative to restoring forest on cleared land. We applied a spatial planning approach to demonstrate how restoration interventions can be targeted to support the conservation of high‐integrity forest, a potential pathway to the delivery of the 30×30 goal of the Convention on Biodiversity's Global Biodiversity Framework.