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.