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.