WCS 3-Sentence Science

Biodiversity and Carbon: Perfect Together

May 9, 2019

Photo credit: Julie Larsen Maher/WCS

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present the work of the WCS’s Tim Davenport on the relationship between forest carbon storage and biodiversity:

1. Biodiversity conservation is often considered to be a co-benefit of protecting carbon sinks such as intact forests to help mitigate climate change.
2. Researchers tested this correlation by conducting 97 face-to-face interviews of local land-use experts in twelve landscapes in seven countries and five continents, followed by another set of face-to-face interviews with biodiversity experts.
3. They found positive carbon-to-biodiversity relationships in ten of the twelve landscapes, with biodiversity impacts of measures to increase carbon also positive in eleven of the twelve landscapes, thus indicating that a random land-use change that increases biodiversity is also likely to increase carbon and vice versa.

Study and Journal: “Payments for adding ecosystem carbon are mostly beneficial to biodiversity” from Environmental Research Letters
WCS Co-Author(s): Tim Davenport , WCS Tanzania Country Program Director

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.