Biodiversity: a key weapon in the fight against climate change
22 December 2009 | News story Maintaining healthy biodiversity
can play a significant role in climate change mitigation and the
world’s protected areas - national parks, marine reserves,
wilderness areas and so on - are essential in safeguarding this
role. Already, protected areas through the vegetation they
contain, store 15% of the world’s terrestrial carbon. They have
enormous untapped potential considering that as much as 20% of
greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation and other land
use changes. Through active restoration of forests or mangroves
and through natural regeneration within protected areas, the
ability of protected areas to store carbon can be significantly
increased. Multiple benefits can be seen on the ground:
protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon are likely to prevent an
estimated 670,000 km² of deforestation by 2050, representing 8
billion t of avoided CO², and in Bolivia, Mexico and Venezuela,
protected areas contain