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Forests play a critical role in stabilizing Earth’s climate. Establishing protected areas (PAs) represents one approach to forest conservation, but PAs were rarely created to mitigate climate change. The global impact of PAs on the carbon cycle has not previously been quantified due to a lack of accurate global-scale carbon stock maps. Here we used ~412 million lidar samples from NASA’s GEDI mission to estimate a total PA aboveground carbon (C) stock of 61.43 Gt (+/− 0.31), 26% of all mapped terrestrial woody C.

Tropical countries are making ambitious commitments to Forest Landscape Restoration with the aim of locking up carbon, conserving biodiversity and benefiting local livelihoods. However, global and national analyses of restoration potential frequently ignore socio-legal complexities which impact both the effectiveness and equitability of restoration. We show that areas with the highest restoration potential are disproportionately found in countries with weak rule of law and frequently in those with substantial areas of unrecognised land tenure.

Governments around the world are increasingly committed to reaching terrestrial and marine conservation goals. But achieving such commitments is challenging, and conservation targets that are reached on paper, e.g., in terms of square kilometers protected, can be misleading. Designating Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) does not guarantee achieving marine conservation goals, and so-called ‘paper parks,’ i.e., MPAs that are legally designated but ineffective, are common.

Community-based approaches to conservation and natural resource management are considered essential to meeting global conservation targets. Despite widespread adoption, there is little understanding about successful and unsuccessful community-based practices because of the challenges of designing robust evaluations to estimate impacts and analyse the underlying mechanisms to impact. Here we present findings from a national scale evaluation of the ‘locally managed marine areas’ network in Fiji, a marine community-based management initiative.

Conservation science is having a reckoning with “parachute science”. In the parachute science model, scientists drop into a foreign country with preconceived notions, seeking to validate their assumptions without genuine engagement with local people, ideas, epistemologies, methodologies, and knowledges, and leave without giving back to the place from which they extracted. This model lacks integrity and produces dubious results with little value to local populations and can even undermine local efforts.

We show that the high seas are colonized by a diverse array of coastal species, which survive and reproduce in the open ocean, contributing strongly to its foating community composition. Analysis of rafting plastic debris in the eastern North Pacifc Subtropical Gyre revealed 37 coastal invertebrate taxa, largely of Western Pacifc origin, exceeding pelagic taxa richness by threefold. Coastal taxa, including diverse taxonomic groups and life history traits, occurred on 70.5% of debris items.