Natural Forests for a Safe Climate: Enhancing Ecosystem Integrity, Biodiversity and Adaptive Capacity for Climate Mitigation

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About this Research Topic

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Background

Climate change and biodiversity loss are recognized among the foremost environmental challenges of our time, inextricably connected together and with human futures. Protecting, conserving and restoring the integrity of ecosystems represent a crucial strategy to simultaneously addressing both climate and biodiversity emergencies, as the recent IPBES-IPCC joint report indicated and as acknowledged in the Glasgow Climate Pact. Forests annually sequester large quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), storing carbon above- and below-ground for centuries to millennia. However, many forests hold just part of what they once stored and therefore have enormous carbon retention potential. Allowing secondary forests to recover natural patterns and processes can provide a key contribution to enhancing carbon storage and biodiversity conservation, by promoting long-term biomass storage, restoration of structural complexity, improvement of ecosystems resilience to climate change.

The integration between data-driven ecosystem knowledge and science-based landscape management approaches is urgently needed to direct the fastest, most effective solutions to improve both climate and biodiversity in the next decades. Enhancing the contribution of terrestrial ecosystems to the carbon cycle, while simultaneously allowing the preservation of biodiversity for future generations, requires new strategies. Those natural processes enhancing tree longevity, soil carbon age, promoting high biomass accumulation and structural diversity still need to be thoroughly described in their dynamics across biomes. Furthermore, identifying which natural traits sustain ecosystem integrity and the system-level properties of stability, resilience and adaptive capacity in response to changing and extreme environmental conditions is crucial for assuring that forests will continue to provide long term climate and biodiversity protection.

This Research Topic aims to determine the mitigation effectiveness of protecting and conserving primary forests and other ecologically mature forests, as well as recovering secondary forests, to the climate change and biodiversity emergencies. We welcome research papers based on empirical, modelling or meta-analytical approaches. These studies may utilize remote sensing and/or ground data to quantify the resilience to climate change of natural forests relative to managed forests, and their contribution to long-term carbon storage and biodiversity preservation. Case studies from all biomes are welcome.

Themes or topics of interest to this Research Topic include:

• Quantifying the unique features that distinguish natural from managed forests: biodiversity, structure, dynamics, carbon accumulation and storage in plants and soils
• The stability, resilience and adaptive capacities of natural vs. managed forests: variation in vulnerability to climate change and biodiversity loss
• Regional projections of forest carbon and biodiversity under climate change
• Relationships between carbon, biodiversity and ecosystem services
• Ecosystem integrity of natural forests: how it can be measured, monitored and mapped, its significance for environmental and economic accounting, how it helps address both climate and biodiversity emergencies.
• Environmental and economic policies to improve protection and increased accumulation of forest carbon, climate resilience, biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Keywords: Ecosystem integrity, Ecosystem services, Forest carbon, Climate Change, Climate mitigation, Climate adaptation, Forest carbon accounting, Environmental policy, Biodiversity

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