Role of Biodiversity in Climate Change Mitigation (ROBIN)

Tropical forests provide us with foods, fibres and medicines, they filter water and control its flow. They also 'soak up' carbon dioxide from the air, mitigating climate change. The REDD+ programme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) seeks to encourage sustainable forest management, thus maintaining ecosystem services, increasing resilience to climate change and conserving forest carbon stocks. To optimise carbon and non-carbon ecosystem services from tropical forests in the face of global change we must improve our understanding of the relationships between biodiversity and the socio-ecological processes through which we respond and adapt to change. The ROBIN project provides information for policy, together with resource use options, under scenarios of socio-economic and climate change. Large-scale regional models have been employed to study how different climate and socioeconomic scenarios and land-use options could influence carbon storage and biodiversity in the long-term. Local case studies were implemented at different sites across a climatic gradient of tropical forest areas. Results showed that biodiversity has a direct positive impact on carbon stocks and can be considered a key part of mitigation policies such as REDD+. One of the project´s key messages is, in relation to the role of biodiversity: biodiversity matters, i.e. biodiverse forests store more carbon and are more resilient to climate change than less biodiverse forests.