Beyond Carbon Recovery, Carbon Persistence in Tropical Forests Under a Changing Climate

Abstract

Forest restoration is increasingly expected to contribute to climate-change mitigation by rebuilding biomass and carbon stocks, yet the persistence of these gains remains uncertain as environmental conditions continue to change. This challenge reflects a temporal mismatch: restoration decisions are made today, whereas restored forests must accumulate and retain carbon for decades. We argue that this mismatch involves two interacting dimensions. Climate and disturbance regimes may change substantially after establishment, while succession simultaneously reorganizes the community responsible for carbon accumulation and retention through recruitment, growth, mortality and species turnover. Restoration therefore confronts two moving targets, the environment in which carbon must persist and the forest that maintains it. We distinguish carbon recovery, the rebuilding of forest carbon stocks following degradation or land-use change, from carbon persistence, the capacity to retain substantial carbon as ecological communities and environmental conditions change through time. In this conceptual perspective, we develop a trajectory-based view of carbon persistence that examines how successional change reshapes the demographic and functional basis of carbon storage and how vulnerability to climatic stress is distributed among carbon-contributing species. We integrate these processes through two complementary pathways, dominance and functional response diversity, and consider how their relative importance may change through succession and environmental exposure. Climate-resilient restoration should therefore consider not only how much carbon is recovered, but whether the recovering forest’s ecological trajectory can retain that carbon under plausible future climatic and disturbance conditions.