Scientists Issue First Formal Consensus on Wildlife's Role in Climate Mitigation

At the 64th session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Subsidiary Bodies in Bonn in June 2026, researchers from countries including India, Rwanda, Chile, and Finland issued the first formal scientific consensus statement affirming that wildlife's ecological functions belong in climate policy. The statement, backed by more than 300 experts, argues that climate assessments and nature-based solutions are "scientifically incomplete" when they exclude the roles of wild animals. It calls on governments to explicitly incorporate wildlife into carbon accounting, ecosystem restoration planning, and conservation strategy under the UNFCCC.

The consensus builds on a scientific framework called "Animating the Carbon Cycle," developed jointly by the Yale School of the Environment and the Global Rewilding Alliance. A foundational 2023 paper in Nature Climate Change by 15 scientists across eight countries estimated that restoring functional wildlife populations could increase global CO2 uptake by an additional 6.41 gigatons annually. Specific case estimates cited include 138 million additional tons of CO2 from restoring forest elephant populations in Congo Basin protected areas, and carbon capture from Serengeti wildebeest recovery roughly equivalent to the combined annual emissions of Kenya and Tanzania.

However, the researchers behind these models are notably more cautious than the headline figures suggest. A follow-up analysis published in People and Nature by many of the same scientists states that "a species' net impact on ecosystem carbon dynamics is context-dependent" and that "the uncertainty around estimates can be high." In some ecosystems animals increase carbon storage; in others they may have no effect or even reduce it. The original 2023 paper acknowledges that scaling rewilding across entire regions "holds large uncertainties," partly because it requires rebuilding large animal populations over short timeframes in ecosystems that may need to shift entirely, such as from forest back to steppe grassland.

The field still lacks a robust way to determine whether animal-driven processes are net carbon-negative or positive across the full plant life cycle, a gap the researchers flag as an open question rather than a solved one. Trophic rewilding remains a promising and increasingly well-evidenced hypothesis for specific species in specific ecosystems, not yet a precisely quantified global carbon budget line item ready for direct accounting. The consensus statement's ambition to incorporate wildlife into formal UNFCCC carbon accounting implies a level of measurement rigor that even leading researchers say is not yet fully established.

This gap matters because the science intersects directly with carbon credit markets and international climate finance, creating a risk of overstating climate benefits attributed to specific conservation interventions. Policymakers adopting these frameworks will need monitoring systems robust enough to avoid such overstatement. The political momentum is real regardless: the consensus follows pledges by African leaders at COP30 to advance a Wildlife for Climate Declaration, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has developed 10 practical recommendations for countries to integrate wildlife into their Nationally Determined Contributions.

Whether that translates into UNFCCC recognition depends on governments accepting not just the ecological logic, which is broadly persuasive, but a quantification framework that its own architects describe as still evolving. The consensus makes clear that wildlife's role in climate mitigation deserves a formal place in climate policy discussions that have historically treated biodiversity and emissions reduction as separate tracks. The harder question left for negotiators is whether that place should come with confident gigaton-scale carbon accounting or with the same cautious, context-dependent framing the scientists apply in their peer-reviewed papers.