Biodiversity-productivity relationships are key to nature-based climate solutions

The global impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change are interlinked
but the feedbacks between them are rarely assessed. Areas with greater
tree diversity tend to be more productive, providing a greater carbon
sink, and biodiversity loss could reduce these natural C sinks. Here, we
quantify how tree and shrub species richness could affect biomass
production at biome, national and regional scales. We find that greenhouse
gas mitigation could help maintain tree diversity and thereby avoid a
9-39% reduction in terrestrial primary productivity across differ biomes,
which cold otherwise occur over the next 50 years. Countries that will
incur the greatest economic damages from climate change stand to benefit
the most from conservation of tree diversity and primary productivity,
which contributes to climate change mitigation. Our results emphasize an
opportunity for a triple win for climate, biodiversity and society, and
highlight how these co-benefits must be focused by reforestation programs.