The effectiveness of climate action and land recovery across ecosystems, climatic zones and scales

Current land-use and climate change patterns lead to disruption in ecosystem services provisioning essential for human well-being. Actions representing alternatives to business-as-usual trend can reduce negative impacts, but their effectiveness across ecosystems, climatic zones and scales is unclear. Here, we analyse how land recovery and climate action can counteract adverse effects of current trends on nature and safeguard provisioning of ecosystem services. Using a meta-analysis approach, we compiled 410 estimates of how land recovery or climate action may alter impacts expected from business-as-usual trends. We show that both alternatives can reduce negative effects on several nature indicators. The magnitude of the effects, however, is context-dependent, revealing their potential complementarity. Land recovery showed highest benefits in terrestrial and freshwater systems in temperate zones and mostly acts at subnational scale. Contrastingly, climate action is more important in coastal and oceanic systems and in tropical regions, where benefits are larger on a regional to global scale. Our results show that land recovery and climate action will be imperative to reduce risks that would be imposed on nature by business-as-usual trends otherwise. We conclude that a better evaluation of which contexts are best suited for certain actions is a first step towards securing nature and the ecosystem services necessary to guarantee human well-being and the fulfilment of the sustainability agenda.