IUCN platform can now assess carbon storage potential in conservation and restoration projects across the Union

According to IUCN, this latest enhancement provides a more comprehensive view of the Union’s benefits both for nature and society.  

The platform, designed to help IUCN constituents assess their potential contributions towards global goals for nature, can now calculate both potential carbon storage and emissions reductions, as well as potential contributions towards species extinction risk reduction. This empowers IUCN’s 1,400+ Members, 18,000 Commission members, and global conservation programmes to quantify their individual and collective impact on biodiversity and climate change goals.

“The IUCN Contributions for Nature Platform’s carbon metric now allows users to see how their protection efforts, as well as their restoration efforts, have the potential to contribute to climate change mitigation,” said IUCN Chief Scientist Thomas Brooks, who led the platform’s development.

“Constituents can use this data to establish baselines for their progress toward global initiatives, such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the UN Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Additionally, this information can help guide future conservation strategies and investments.”

The new functionality brings together methodologies for calculating carbon storage in natural ecosystems and croplands with respect to ongoing habitat conversion, offering an estimate of the potential conservation benefit in mitigating climate change within a defined area. It also assesses potential CO2 removal rates from landscape restoration efforts. The underlying data for natural ecosystems are provided by Conservation International, through their irrecoverable carbon research , while those for managed ecosystems are sourced from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).   

These innovations build on the existing functionality within the IUCN Contributions for Nature Platform to measure potential contributions towards global biodiversity goals, using the Species Threat Abatement and Restoration (STAR) metric based on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. With the addition of carbon storage calculations, the platform now provides a more comprehensive evaluation of conservation projects worldwide.

Currently, the IUCN Contributions for Nature Platform hosts more than 10,000 project entries, many of them documented by IUCN constituents engagement in the 2024 IUCN Regional Conservation Fora. These and other submissions will be highlighted at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, being held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, from 9-13 October 2025. 

In this light, all IUCN Members and other constituents are invited to document their conservation and restoration projects with a spatial footprint in the platform over the coming months.