Carbonservation with Demonstrated Biodiversity and Carbon Gains: Carbon Can Pay But Biodiversity Must Lead.

Land use has a critical role to play in both climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation, and increasingly there have been calls to integrate policies for concurrently meeting Paris Agreement commitments and the UN decade on ecosystem restoration 2021-2030. Currently however, investment activities have been dominated by climate change mitigation activities, including through the development of carbon markets (both voluntary and compliance markets). Whilst climate change mitigation is to be welcomed, the prioritization of carbon in avoided deforestation and reforestation can lead to suboptimal or negative outcomes for biodiversity. Restoration of degraded native vegetation may provide an opportunity for concurrent production of both carbon and biodiversity benefits, by harnessing existing carbon markets without the need to trade-off biodiversity outcomes. Here we demonstrate that carbon sequestered by restoring degraded temperate woodland can pay the price of the restored biodiversity. This is shown using conservative carbon prices in an established market (during both a voluntary and compliance market phase), and the restoration price revealed by a 10-year conservation incentive payment scheme. When recovery rates are high, market prices for carbon could pay the full price of restoration, with additional independent investment needed in cases where recovery trajectories are slower. Using carbon markets to fund restoration of degraded native vegetation thereby provides a solution for constrained resources and problematic trade-offs between carbon and biodiversity outcomes. Multi-attribute markets offer the potential to greatly increase the extent of restoration for biodiversity conservation, while providing an affordable source of carbon sequestration and enhancing economic benefits to landowners.

Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide Between Ecosystem Service Suppliers and Beneficiaries: Using a Distributed Community Nursery to Support Rural Revegetation.

The provision of ecosystem services from vegetation on private land is constrained by a lack of effective markets to overcome the costs of supply. Urban beneficiaries of ecosystem services from vegetation on private, rural land have limited options for enhancing the supply. This study examines a not-for-profit revegetation programme, the Tree Scheme, in which participants are volunteers who grow seedlings for revegetation on rural land, and rural landholders who use the seedlings in revegetation. We used records of participation and seedlings, along with participant questionnaires to investigate the flow of resources between volunteer growers and rural landholders. The programme produced approximately 22.5 million seedlings between 1994 and 2012; 79% of seedlings were grown in urban locations and 79% of seedlings were ordered for rural plantings. Landholders identified a mixture of objectives for revegetation, with improvement of habitat and biodiversity being most common, followed by objectives with higher private benefits, including planting for windbreaks, erosion control and screening. Volunteer growers reported liking the programme because of the programme's intended environmental benefits, the satisfaction they gained from raising seedlings and other social benefits of participation. The programme demonstrates that a substantial flow of resources between urban ecosystem services beneficiaries and rural producers can be achieved by facilitating voluntary actions. The type and scale of this programme is rare and potentially transferable.