My Climate Change News

Forest restoration is fundamental to overcoming biodiversity crises and climate change. In tropical forests, animals can improve forest recovery as they disperse >70% of tree species. However, representing animals in restoration and climate change policies remains challenging because a quantitative assessment of their contribution to forest and carbon recovery is lacking. Here we used individual-based models to assess frugivore-mediated seed rain in open areas along a fragmentation gradient. Movements of large birds were limited in landscapes with <40% forest cover, although small birds continued to disperse seeds. Large birds disperse seeds of late-successional species with higher carbon storage potential. Their restricted movement therefore reduced potential biomass in future forests by 38%. Maintaining forest cover >40% is essential to optimizing animals’ contribution to restoration success. Active restoration (for example, planting trees) is required in more fragmented lan

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Natural climate solutions (NCS) present opportunities to address climate change while promoting biodiversity conservation and human well-being. The IPCC suggests that to prevent global temperature increases beyond 2?°C, NCS must remove and store around 10?GtCO2 from the atmosphere annually, of which ~62% is associated with forests1,2,3. In this context, forest restoration has gained massive global expansion with the promotion of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration4,5,6,7. However, forest restoration remains a complex social and ecological challenge, particularly in tropical regions that are central to achieving climate and biodiversity goals1,8. Natural forest regeneration often presents an ecologically responsible and cost-effective method for recovery relative to active planting. Yet, this is not always possible in degraded regions where the soil is too depleted or the seed bank has been irreparably changed, and it remains unclear which ecosystems can...