Data from: Win-wins or trade-offs? Site and strategy determine carbon and local ecosystem service benefits for protection, restoration, and agroforestry

This data package contains original datasets from McDonald et al. (2024),
available online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2024.1432654
Nature-based solutions (NBS) can deliver many benefits to human
well-being, including some crucial to climate adaptation. We
quantitatively assess the global potential of NBS strategies of
protection, restoration, and agroforestry by modeling global climate
change mitigation and local ecosystem services. The strategies with the
most potential to help people do not necessarily deliver the most climate
change mitigation: per area of conservation action, agroforestry provides
substantial benefits to three times more people on average than
reforestation while providing less than one-tenth the carbon sequestration
per unit area. Each strategy delivers a different suite of ecosystem
service benefits; for instance, avoided forest conversion provides a
strong increase in nitrogen retention (100% increase to 72 million people
if fully implemented globally) while agroforestry increases pollination
services (100% increase to 3.0 billion people if fully implemented
globally). One common disservice shared by all the NBS strategies modeled
here is that increased woody biomass increases transpiration, reducing
annual runoff and in some watersheds negatively impacting local water
availability. In addition, the places with the greatest potential for
climate change mitigation are not necessarily the ones with the most
people. For instance, reforestation in Latin America has the greatest
climate change mitigation potential, but the greatest ecosystem service
benefits are in Africa. Focusing on nations with high climate mitigation
potential as well as high local ecosystem service potential, such as
Nigeria in the case of reforestation, India for agroforestry, and the
Republic of Congo for avoided forest conversion, can help identify win-win
sites for implementation. We find that concentrating the implementation of
these three conservation strategies in critical places, covering 5.8
million km2 could benefit 2.0 billion people with increased local
ecosystem services provision. These critical places cover only 35% of the
possible area of implementation but would provide 80% of the benefits that
are possible globally for the selected set of ecosystem services under the
NBS scenarios examined here. We conclude that targeting these critical
places for protection, restoration, and agroforestry interventions will be
key to achieving adaptation and human well-being goals while also
increasing nature-based carbon mitigation.