Increases in woody vegetation in grassy ecosystems could provide some carbon increase (medium confidence) (Zhou et al., 2017; Mureva et al., 2018), but is expected to decrease biodiversity (Smit and Prins, 2015; Abreu et al., 2017; Andersen and Steidl, 2019) and water availability (Honda and Durigan, 2016; Stafford et al., 2017) and alter ecosystem services like grazing and wood provision