DOI: 10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjcr
title: Data from: Win-wins or trade-offs? Site and strategy determine carbon and local ecosystem service benefits for protection, restoration, and agroforestry

description: This data package contains original datasets from McDonald et al. (2024),
 available online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2024.1432654
 Nature-based solutions (NBS) can deliver many benefits to human
 well-being, including some crucial to climate adaptation. We
 quantitatively assess the global potential of NBS strategies of
 protection, restoration, and agroforestry by modeling global climate
 change mitigation and local ecosystem services. The strategies with the
 most potential to help people do not necessarily deliver the most climate
 change mitigation: per area of conservation action, agroforestry provides
 substantial benefits to three times more people on average than
 reforestation while providing less than one-tenth the carbon sequestration
 per unit area. Each strategy delivers a different suite of ecosystem
 service benefits; for instance, avoided forest conversion provides a
 strong increase in nitrogen retention (100% increase to 72 million people
 if fully implemented globally) while agroforestry increases pollination
 services (100% increase to 3.0 billion people if fully implemented
 globally). One common disservice shared by all the NBS strategies modeled
 here is that increased woody biomass increases transpiration, reducing
 annual runoff and in some watersheds negatively impacting local water
 availability. In addition, the places with the greatest potential for
 climate change mitigation are not necessarily the ones with the most
 people. For instance, reforestation in Latin America has the greatest
 climate change mitigation potential, but the greatest ecosystem service
 benefits are in Africa. Focusing on nations with high climate mitigation
 potential as well as high local ecosystem service potential, such as
 Nigeria in the case of reforestation, India for agroforestry, and the
 Republic of Congo for avoided forest conversion, can help identify win-win
 sites for implementation. We find that concentrating the implementation of
 these three conservation strategies in critical places, covering 5.8
 million km2 could benefit 2.0 billion people with increased local
 ecosystem services provision. These critical places cover only 35% of the
 possible area of implementation but would provide 80% of the benefits that
 are possible globally for the selected set of ecosystem services under the
 NBS scenarios examined here. We conclude that targeting these critical
 places for protection, restoration, and agroforestry interventions will be
 key to achieving adaptation and human well-being goals while also
 increasing nature-based carbon mitigation.
description: Our analysis proceeded in six steps: 1) defining a conceptual
 framework for ecosystem services and their relationship to adaptation
 benefits; 2) selecting the input scenarios of conservation action; 3)
 selecting other key global datasets needed for our analysis; 4) ecosystem
 service modeling in biophysical terms; 5) calculating and mapping of
 beneficiaries; and 6) prioritization analysis to select sites for
 conservation action with high human well-being benefits. Please the
 journal article for details on each step. This data
 package includes the original datasets created by this analysis, in the
 form of easy-to-use raster maps. Many of the figures in the paper are
 simple summaries, by country or basin, derived from these
 rasters.
description: # Data from: Win-wins or trade-offs? Site and strategy determine carbon
 and local ecosystem service benefits for protection, restoration, and
 agroforestry
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjcr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjcr) ## Description of the data and file structure This data package contains information on seven ecosystem services for three Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) scenarios, as used in McDonald et al. 2024. Our analysis proceeded in six steps: 1) defining a conceptual framework for ecosystem services and their relationship to adaptation benefits; 2) selecting the input scenarios of conservation action; 3) selecting other key global datasets needed for our analysis; 4) ecosystem service modeling in biophysical terms; 5) calculating and mapping of beneficiaries; and 6) prioritization analysis to select sites for conservation action with high human well-being benefits. Please see the manuscript for details of each step. ### Files and variables #### File: McDonald\_et\_al\_2024\_Data\_Dryad.zip **Description:** This Zip file contains a summary Excel table and a folder. Figure1_Carbon_and_population_by_NCS.xlsx = An Excel table containing the information used to build Figure 1 in the paper. "Cobenefits ES modelling raster layers" = A folder containing information on seven ecosystem services for three NCS scenarios, as used in McDonald et al. 2024. This is a simplified representation of the data, for use while making maps and summary statistics. This data is the same as is displayed in the Naturebase platform (https://naturebase.org/). Carbon sequestration information (not in this data package) can be downloaded directly from there. For access to the raw (not categorized) ecosystem service data, which is substantially larger in size, please email [rob_mcdonald@tnc.org](mailto:rob_mcdonald@tnc.org). Data format: Each raster layer (in TIF format) represents the change in one ecosystem service (each ecosystem service's raster is contained in a subfolder, labeled with the ecosystem services name) with implementation of one of the NCS scenarios (AFC= Avoided Forest Conversion, Agroforest = Agroforestry, and Reforest = Reforestation), and is represented with a 13-category grid, defined in a consistent way for all ecosystem services and all NCS scenarios. Categories are based off of the percent change in ecosystem service provision from the baseline (2020) provision. Positive is always better, negative is always worse, relative to baseline. There is a zero category (no change), and then 6 negative and 6 positive categories: 1 (0-5%), 2 (5-10%), 3 (10-20%), 4 (20-50%), 5 (50-100%), and 6 (&gt; 100%). Note that for some layers, not all categories are present. For instance, reforestation has a generally negative effect on water runoff, some most pixels are either zero (no change) or -1 (0-5% worse). ## Code/software TIF files can be viewed using any GIS software. The TIF files created in this package were created with ArcGIS Pro.