Co-benefits and trade-offs between Natural Climate Solutions and Sustainable Development Goals

Combating climate change and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are two important challenges humanity is facing. Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) can contribute to the achievement of these two commitments but can also generate conflicting trade-offs. Here, we reviewed the literature and used expert knowledge to assess co-benefits and trade-offs between 12 NCS-related ecosystems and 150 SDG targets. We show that terrestrial, coastal and marine NCS enable the achievement of a different set of SDG targets with low redundancy. Implementing NCS in various ecosystems would therefore maximise the achievement of SDG targets but would also induce trade-offs, particularly if best practices are not followed. As the world prepares to deploy NCS at large scales, these trade-offs need to be considered to ensure that NCS achieve widespread climate outcomes while also delivering a large breadth of SDG targets for diverse stakeholder