This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As nations race to restore ecosystems and curb climate change, research has shown that letting nature do the work is a cost-effective, viable solution. A study from the University of Queensland and the University of Newcastle found that natural forest regeneration delivered substantial carbon and biodiversity benefits and could be up to 96% cheaper than traditional tree-planting programs.
The work is published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. School of the Environment Ph.D. candidate Jiaqi Li said the team mapped how the costs and benefits of natural regeneration varied across the tropics. "Nature is a great gardener.
Sometimes we just need to get out of its way while providing a bit of support," Li said. "For tree planting, you need to purchase seeds and hire workers or recruit volunteers to plant and manage them, which is costly. "For natural regeneration, people just need to check the land for invasive species and remove them, make sure there are adequate seed sources, provide protection from fire, grazing animals and humans, and then it is mostly self-sufficient.
"In many cases of natural regeneration, studies show that you can end up with a forest that could store more carbon and is more biodiverse than a planted forest." Between 2000 and 2012, tropical forests were reduced globally by 2.3 million km² (890,000 square miles), leading to the release of an estimated 0.86 gigatons of carbon annually and threatening the well-being of around 1.5 billion people dependent on forests. "Forests are Earth's life-support systems, and tropical forests are the most biodiverse among all forest types, covering 18% of the land and home to more than half of all land vertebrate species," Li said. "They are also a giant carbon sink, so when deforestation happens, we not only stop the forest from taking up carbon, but we also flip it and turn it into a carbon source." Li said the study identified areas where natural regeneration provided high carbon benefits, high biodiversity benefits and low restoration costs and called them "holistic hotspots." These areas were mostly located in Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines, Mexico and Malaysia.
"The carbon benefits stand out most in Neotropical areas like the Amazon basin and in the Indomalayan tropics like Borneo, Sumatra and Papua New Guinea," Li said. "There are more biodiversity benefits in the Afrotropics, including Madagascar." Senior author Dr. Brooke Williams from the University of Newcastle said that, with the world pledging in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to restore 30% of Earth's degraded land, natural regeneration was more important than ever.
"The whole world is fighting climate change, and on top of that, nations have goals to reverse the biodiversity crisis," Williams said. "Restoring forests is expensive, and the cost could mean some nations can't meet their ambitious restoration goals. "Our study gives a broad idea of the benefits and costs that could occur with natural regeneration." UQ Associate Professor Matthew Luskin, who co-authored the study, said the research was a huge leap forward in putting theories about forest restoration into practice.
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