Variable impacts of land-based climate mitigation on habitat area for vertebrate diversity

Pathways to achieving net zero carbon emissions commonly involve deploying reforestation, afforestation, and bioenergy crops across millions of hectares of land. It is often assumed that by helping to mitigate climate change, these strategies indirectly benefit biodiversity. Here, we modeled the climate and habitat requirements of 14,234 vertebrate species and show that the impact of these strategies on species’ habitat area tends not to arise through climate mitigation, but rather through habitat conversion. Across locations, reforestation tends to provide species more habitat through both land-cover change and climate mitigation, whereas habitat loss from afforestation and bioenergy cropping typically outweighs the climate mitigation benefits. This work shows how and where land-based mitigation strategies can be deployed without inadvertently reducing the area of habitat for global biodiversity.