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Trees outside of forests as natural climate solutions

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 1013–1016 (2021)Cite this article

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Trees outside of forests are numerous and can be important carbon sinks, while also providing ecosystem services and benefits to livelihoods. New monitoring tools highlight the crucial contribution they can make to strategies for both mitigation and adaptation.

High-biomass natural forests are an important focal point for climate change mitigation action and thus are targets of large public and private investments, particularly in developing countries in the tropics. The most prominent international forest initiative for climate change mitigation is the framework for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, or REDD+, which emphasizes closed canopy tropical forests. However, with emerging new capabilities for measuring and mapping trees outside forests (TOF), especially using new Earth-observation methods, there will be a missed opportunity if the mitigation dialogue does not include a range of non-forest tree-based systems, which could provide broad additional benefits, including landscape restoration, conservation of biodiversity and enhancing the livelihoods of more than a billion people, many of whom live in extreme poverty1.

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Fig. 1: Trees outside of forests in central Malawi.

D. L. Skole.

Fig. 2: Country-scale assessment of trees in Rwanda using digital aerial photos and an example of digital satellite–derived data coverage of savannah ecosystems in Senegal.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by NASA’s Land Cover and Land Use Change Program, NASA grants 80NSSC21K0315 and 80NSSC20K0263, and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement no. 947757 TOFDRY) and a DFF Sapere Aude grant (no. 9064–00049B). The work was also supported by the University of Copenhagen, University of Pretoria and Michigan State University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services, Department of Forestry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    David L. Skole & Jay H. Samek

  2. Future Africa Institute, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Cheikh Mbow

  3. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Maurice Mugabowindekwe & Martin S. Brandt

  4. Centre for Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing, College of Science and Technology, University of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda

    Maurice Mugabowindekwe

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  1. David L. Skole
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  3. Maurice Mugabowindekwe
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  4. Martin S. Brandt
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  5. Jay H. Samek
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Contributions

All authors contributed equally to the work. D.L.S conceived of the manuscript; D.L.S, M.S.B, C.M., M.M. and J.H.S. contributed to the writing, review and editing. MM. and J.H.S contributed technical analysis of data. All authors share the views expressed in this comment.

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Correspondence to David L. Skole.

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Skole, D.L., Mbow, C., Mugabowindekwe, M. et al. Trees outside of forests as natural climate solutions. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 1013–1016 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01230-3

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