Forest biodiversity and livelihoods
SelvaFlux measures methane uptake and is developing a crediting method. A standing forest also supports biodiversity, water supplies, local climate, and livelihoods. Those benefits are outside the methane credit.
Tropical forests cover a small share of the planet and hold most of its land-living species. Keeping a forest intact protects that habitat. Forest clearing is the largest single driver of species loss on land. Carbon accounts do not capture that loss.
Tropical forests release large volumes of water into the air. Winds carry that moisture to farmland hundreds of miles away, where it falls as rain. Clearing forests can reduce that rainfall.
Forests provide homes, food and medicine for the people who live in and manage them. They are also part of people’s identity. Across the tropics, forests held by Indigenous peoples and local communities are cleared and degraded less than other forests. Revenue that reaches those communities can help them keep their forests. Sze et al. 2022
Many people place value on tropical forests and their species continuing to exist, including forests they will never see. Economists call this existence value. It has no market price, and the surveys used to estimate it are not reliable enough for us to publish a figure.
The genetic variety in a tropical forest cannot be rebuilt once it is lost. Many modern medicines began as compounds first found in wild species, and most tropical species have never been screened for medical use.
Downstream
Forest roots hold soil that would otherwise wash into rivers, and the forest floor filters rainwater before it reaches streams and the aquifers below. Towns and cities downstream get cleaner and steadier water because the forest is there.
Forests also supply moisture for rain downwind, as described above. Here, we consider the quality and flow of water in rivers and aquifers.
In the United States, where the water supply has been mapped in detail, forested land covers 36% of the area but provides half of the surface water, and about 60 million people draw more than half of their surface drinking water from forests. Liu et al. 2021
When a source watershed loses its natural cover, water quality falls and treatment costs rise. One study of large cities worldwide found that watershed degradation raised the sediment, phosphorus, and nitrogen that utilities must remove, and pushed treatment costs higher for about one in three of them. McDonald et al. 2016
Research on forest benefits
The studies below quantify specific benefits in specific regions. Each result links to its source.
| Co-benefit | What the evidence shows | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Rainfall | Keeping Amazon forest standing prevents up to about $1 billion a year in regional farm losses, by sustaining the rainfall that downwind agriculture depends on. | Leite-Filho et al. 2021 |
| Biodiversity | Land-use change, led by clearing forest for agriculture, is the single largest driver of terrestrial species loss worldwide. | IPBES 2019 |
| Local cooling | Apart from storing carbon, a forest cools the air around it by releasing water vapor and shading the ground. Tropical forest lowers the local surface temperature by about 1°C on average, and up to 2.4°C, compared with nearby cleared land. | Lawrence et al. 2022 |
| Coastal protection | Mangroves prevent more than $65 billion a year in flood damage. Without them, about 15 million more people would be flooded each year. | Menéndez et al. 2020 |
| Health | Across the Brazilian Amazon, a 10% rise in deforestation was associated with about a 3.3% rise in malaria cases. | MacDonald & Mordecai 2019 |
| Medicines from wild species | Of the roughly 1,400 small-molecule drugs approved worldwide from 1981 to 2019, about a third are natural products or direct derivatives of them. | Newman & Cragg 2020 |
| Livelihoods | For rural households near forests, income from forests and wild resources is about 28% of what they earn, close to the share from farming. Most of it comes from natural forests. | Angelsen et al. 2014 |
| Jobs | Restoration creates about 0.42 jobs per hectare; Brazil's 12-million-hectare target implies 1 to 2.5 million jobs. The total change in jobs across a landscape is less certain. Most restoration work happens early, and it replaces some work in other land uses. | Brancalion et al. 2022 |
These are co-benefits of keeping forests standing. SelvaFlux does not sell them as credits. The figures come from specific regions and project types and are not universal. On jobs in particular, the total change in jobs across a landscape remains uncertain.
SelvaFlux is developing a proposed credit for measured methane uptake. Approval and verification would be required before issuance. The other forest benefits on this page would remain outside that methane credit.