Reply to: The risks of overstating the climate benefits of ecosystem restoration

Abstract

In the associated Comment, Doelman et al.1 suggest that findings from our recent paper2 overestimate the potential contribution of restoration to climate change mitigation, and suggest that our assumptions were incorrect and that we did not consider practical constraints to the implementation of the scenarios that we presented. We welcome their interest and agree with Doelman et al.1 that realizing the full potential contributions of large-scale restoration to the mitigation of climate change (and conservation of biodiversity) will be challenging. We strongly disagree, however, that we have overestimated the scale of plausible contributions or failed to consider practical limitations to their delivery.The central argument of Doelman et al.1 is that a fraction of each pixel in the subcategory of cropland mosaics from the land-cover product3 that we used1 contains natural vegetation (they cite 40–60%) and a higher current carbon content than we considered, and that accounting for this would significantly affect our estimates of the contribution of restauration to the mitigation of climate change. Although an analysis within our 300 m pixels was beyond the original scope of our global analysis, we decided to investigate the effect on our estimates by accounting for natural vegetation within our mosaic pixels.