It is widely recognized that actions aimed at conserving, restoring and sustainably manage nature will not only help address biodiversity loss and deterioration of ecosystems but also contribute to climate change mitigation, resilience and adaptation. The 25th UN Climate Change Conference of Parties recognized this by underlying “the need to address biodiversity loss and climate change in an integrated manner”.
These actions, however, need to be highly-location specific, given that biodiversity and carbon stocks are distributed unequally across space. The Nature Map project, a consortium formed by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Instituto Internacional para Sustentabilidade (IIS), the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), and the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), aims to support the design and planning of those actions by developing global maps based on the best available scientific data on biodiversity, carbon storage and other ecosystem services. The combination of those maps have been used to identify areas of global significance for conservation and restoration, which could help to identify areas where conservation and restoration actions would provide the highest benefits for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and potentially other ecosystem services.