Community Management and Wellbeing Increase the Resilience of Nepali Forests to Climate Change

Community-based conservation initiatives are essential for mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet, the communities leading these efforts are themselves disproportionately impacted by climate change. Despite this, there is little insight about how resilient community-based conservation institutions are to extreme weather and how contextual factors, such as material wellbeing, further affect their durability. We examined this dynamic across nearly 20,000 community-managed forests in Nepal using high-resolution mapping of forest change from 2018–2023. Our analysis revealed that, without community management, tree clearing doubled in response to anomalous precipitation patterns. In contrast, community-managed forests showed no change in tree loss, with resilience to extreme weather similarly bolstered by community wellbeing. Unlike formal protected areas, community-managed forests also maintain local access to essential resources, likely limiting tree harvesting by encouraging cultivation of non-timber forest products. These findings underscore the vulnerability of forests to climate instability and the protective potential of local management.