Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs.

Abstract

International commitments for ecosystem restoration add-up to one-quarter of the world´s arable land. Fulfilling them would ease global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity decline, but could displace food production and impose financial costs on farmers. Here we show a novel restoration prioritization approach capable of revealing these synergies and trade-offs, incorporating for the first time ecological and economic efficiencies of scale and modelling specific policy options. We show, for an actual large scale restoration target of the Atlantic Forest hotspot, that our approach can deliver an eightfold increase in cost-effectiveness for biodiversity conservation compared to a baseline of non-systematic restoration. A compromise solution avoids 26% of the biome’s current extinction debt of 2864 plant and animal species (an increase of 257% compared to the baseline), and sequesters 1 billion tonnes of CO2Eq (a 105% increase) while reducing costs by US$ 28 billion (a 57% decrease). Seizing similar opportunities elsewhere would offer substantial contributions to some of humankind´s greatest challenges.