Beyond methane
SelvaFlux measures and credits methane uptake. 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. A standing project keeps that habitat intact. Clearing it is the largest single driver of species loss on land, and none of that shows up in a carbon ledger.
A tropical forest moves large volumes of water into the air, and that moisture travels downwind as flying rivers, falling as rain on farmland hundreds of miles away. Clear the forest and that rainfall can fail with it.
For the people who live in and manage these forests, the forest is home, food, medicine, and part of their identity. Forests held by Indigenous peoples and local communities are cleared and degraded less than others across the tropics, one reason revenue that reaches those communities keeps forests standing. 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
A forest is also a watershed. 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.
Flying rivers carry forest moisture to farmland downwind. The water benefit described here concerns the quality and flow of water in the forest’s 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
The evidence
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 |
| Genetic library | 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 net effect across a whole landscape is less certain, because restoration work is front-loaded and displaces 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 net effect across a whole landscape is unsettled.
What we sell
SelvaFlux sells credits for measured methane uptake. The other benefits listed on this page are not included in those credits.