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Tropical forest loss currently exceeds forest gain, leading to a net greenhouse gas emission that exacerbates global climate change. This has sparked scientific debate on how to achieve natural climate solutions. Central to this debate is whether sustainably managing forests and protected areas will deliver global climate mitigation benefits, while ensuring local peoples' health and well-being. Here, we evaluate the 10-y impact of a human-centered solution to achieve natural climate mitigation through reductions in illegal logging in rural Borneo: an intervention aimed at expanding health care access and use for communities living near a national park, with clinic discounts offsetting costs historically met through illegal logging. Conservation, education, and alternative livelihood programs were also offered. We hypothesized that this would lead to improved health and well-being, while also alleviating illegal logging activity within the protected forest. We estimated that 27.4 km2 of deforestation was averted in the national park over a decade (∼70% reduction in deforestation compared to a synthetic control, permuted P = 0.038). Concurrently, the intervention provided health care access to more than 28,400 unique patients, with clinic usage and patient visitation frequency highest in communities participating in the intervention. Finally, we observed a dose-response in forest change rate to intervention engagement (person-contacts with intervention activities) across communities bordering the park: The greatest logging reductions were adjacent to the most highly engaged villages. Results suggest that this community-derived solution simultaneously improved health care access for local and indigenous communities and sustainably conserved carbon stocks in a protected tropical forest.

The island of Borneo suffers from one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, primarily due to agriculture, logging, and other human activities. This habitat loss may be partly mitigated by reforestation programs in degraded landscapes, especially anthropogenic grasslands that have little conservation or economic value. By monitoring native bird communities, we evaluated the success of two small (<20 ha) community reforestation projects in Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesian Borneo. Birds responded rapidly following reforestation, with species richness doubling over 7 years at one site, and increasing by 29% in just 3 years at the other. Final tallies (63–70 species per site) were comparable to those obtained in older secondary forests elsewhere in Borneo. Anthropogenic fire is the primary threat to reforestation success, but intensive fire prevention allows bird communities to recover from temporary setbacks. Absence of fire was thus the most important factor in recovery, and we detected no effect of replanted area on bird species richness. Our results suggest that by engaging local communities and ensuring long-term maintenance, even small reforestation sites in Borneo can provide immediate benefits for native biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]