A global assessment reveals widespread co-benefits for forest protection

Avoided forest conversion (“AFC”) is a high-impact conservation and climate mitigation strategy, yet its impacts on human well-being and ecosystems remain an open question. We present the first global and comprehensive assessment of AFC impacts on human material and non-material well-being, biodiversity, and ecosystem services in a set of 29,038 studies published between 1990-2022. We leveraged an ensemble of open- and closed-weight GPT models, training regimes, and architectures, and applied novel approaches to detect hallucination-induced reasoning errors.