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A call to develop carbon credits for second-growth forests

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 8, pages 179–180 (2024)Cite this article

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Natural climate solutions have gained momentum as being central to mitigating climate change while generating co-benefits for nature and people1. Among the solutions that are available, tropical reforestation is second only to avoided forest conversion in terms of cost-effectiveness2. Initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge, the Trillion Tree Campaign and the United Nations’ Decade on Ecosystem Restoration have established ambitious commitments for forest landscape restoration, mostly for tropical regions. Although different approaches can be used to increase tree cover in deforested landscapes, there is a large body of evidence that natural forest regrowth is the most viable option3. But in spite of the enormous potential, the fact that many second-growth forests in human-modified landscapes are extremely short-lived has undermined their contribution to mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss.

To recover high levels of carbon sequestration, biodiversity, landscape connectivity and other ecosystem functions, tropical forests need to regenerate over the course of decades4, but currently a large portion of them are re-cleared after only a few years5. These forests are like the fictional character Peter Pan, created by the novelist J. M. Barrie in 1904 — just as Peter Pan never grows up, many second-growth tropical forests remain forever young. For instance, nearly one-third of the 4.5 Mha of second-growth forests regenerated between 1985 and 2019 in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest were re-cleared after only around 8 years6; these numbers are even higher in the Brazilian Amazon, where nearly 60% of second-growth forests are cleared in the first 10 years7. A similar pattern of conversion of young secondary forests was also observed in Costa Rica5.

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Fig. 1: Effect of carbon finance on the temporal sequence of land use and aboveground biomass.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Sciences, University of São Paulo, Piracicaba, Brazil

    Pedro H. S. Brancalion

  2. Re.green, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Pedro H. S. Brancalion, Ricardo R. Rodrigues & Bernardo B. N. Strassburg

  3. Department of Zoology and Conservation Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Andrew Balmford & Tom Swinfield

  4. Department of Plant Sciences and Conservation Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Charlotte E. Wheeler

  5. Department of Biological Sciences, University of São Paulo, Piracicaba, Brazil

    Ricardo R. Rodrigues

  6. Rio Conservation and Sustainability Science Centre, Department of Geography and the Environment, Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Bernardo B. N. Strassburg

Authors
  1. Pedro H. S. Brancalion
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  2. Andrew Balmford
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  3. Charlotte E. Wheeler
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  4. Ricardo R. Rodrigues
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  5. Bernardo B. N. Strassburg
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  6. Tom Swinfield
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pedro H. S. Brancalion.

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Competing interests

P.H.S.B., R.R.R. and B.B.N.S. are partners at Re.green, a restoration company. A.B., C.E.W. and T.S. are members of the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Sara Löfqvist for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Brancalion, P.H.S., Balmford, A., Wheeler, C.E. et al. A call to develop carbon credits for second-growth forests. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 179–180 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02288-2

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