# Estimating the carbon impacts of leakage from forest restoration and the costs of reducing them

*2026-04-01 — paper*

Authors: Francisco d'Albertas, Tom Swinfield, Ben Filewod, Stefan Wirsenius, Timothy Searchinger, Thomas Ball, Gianluca Cerullo, Jody Holland, Anil Madhavapeddy, Demetrius Martins, Sara Mortara, Andrew Balmford


Ecosystem restoration is a key nature-based climate solution but risks
displacing economic activities and triggering leakage – whereby forgone
production drives habitat loss elsewhere, eroding benefits.

Focusing on reforestation opportunities Brazilian ranchland, we characterized leakage risk
as the ratio of forgone beef production to carbon gained. Assuming 100% of
forgone production results in extensification we asked: "what is the impact of
unaddressed leakage; how much can leakage be reduced by prioritizing
restoration in low-yielding, high-carbon areas; and can it be cost-effectively
mitigated by targeted intensification?".

Taking likely leakage into account but not tackling it increased median costs of restoration (over ignoring it
entirely) by 43-100%, to median values of 33 and 24 USD tCO₂e⁻¹ in the Atlantic
Forest and Amazon, respectively.
Prioritizing low-leakage sites reduced these
costs by 21–37%; combining this with targeted intensification cut net carbon
costs further, to 67% of unmitigated levels.

Our broad findings hold at 30% (cf
100%) extensification and in other sensitivity analyses, and reveal leakage can
substantially increase carbon costs, but that careful siting and targeted
intensification can provide extremely cost-effective mitigation.


DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9440067/v1
Classification: preprint
Venue: Research Square
URL: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9440067/v1

## Related

- [.plan-26-17: Unwedging kernels, dogfood deployments, and managing beef leakage](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w17) (note, 2026-04-26)

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Canonical: https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2026-forest-leakage
Type: paper
Tags: preprint