Carbon and Biodiversity Co-benefits in Tropical Forest and Agroforestry Ecosystems: A review

Abstract

Global efforts to mitigate climate change are focused on the protection and restoration of forest carbon. These efforts do not only hold promise for climate protection but also other benefits including conservation of biodiversity, the majority of which is sheltered in the forest. These include actions to combat climate change and land degradation and actions to halt biodiversity loss through sustainable forest management. However, the challenge remains as to what extent forest conservation that optimizes carbon storage will conserve biodiversity. Understanding synergies between climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation could be the basis for attaining sustainable development goals. Library catalogues and public database for studies that included carbon stock and biodiversity co-benefits/relationships in tropical forests were searched and included in a review. This review reveals that forest conservation for carbon is showing promising results for biodiversity in undisturbed/relatively disturbed tropical forest ecosystems. However, some areas with high biodiversity but low carbon may not benefit from carbon-based conservation. Given the tropical ecosystem dynamics, it is important to generate more data based on a specific ecosystem to ascertain the level of this co-benefit. This review forms the basis for considering biodiversity conservation in carbon-based conservation planning.