Forests, peatlands, and oceans appear in national climate plans as carbon stores. Wildlife barely figures at all. That is what 300 scientists from six continents want to change: at the 64th session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's subsidiary bodies (SB64) in Bonn, they presented a joint consensus statement on June 11, 2026, calling for wildlife to be explicitly included in national climate strategies. The backdrop is mounting research showing that what animals do to the global carbon cycle is systematically underestimated.
How animals influence climate
The carbon cycle does not function through photosynthesis and soil alone. Animals intervene actively. Grazing bison and elephants trample seeds into soil, preparing nesting sites for carbon-sequestering plants. Whales transport nutrients from the deep sea to the surface, where phytoplankton benefit and then carry carbon to the seafloor as they sink. Wolves and other predators regulate prey populations, allowing forests to recover by preventing overgrazing.
A 2023 study published in Nature Climate Change, led by Yale ecologist Oswald Schmitz and 15 researchers from eight countries, quantified nine such mechanisms. The examined species: ocean fish, whales, sharks, gray wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants, and American bison. Result: if these populations were restored to biologically healthy levels, they could together sequester an additional 6.41 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. According to the study authors, this equals roughly 95 percent of annual carbon removal needed to meet the Paris Agreement's 1.5-degree goal.
287 researchers, six continents, one demand
The consensus statement presented at SB64 in Bonn started with 287 signatories and has since exceeded 300. Researchers represent India, Rwanda, Chile, Finland, North America, and Oceania. Disciplines range from wildlife biology through climate science to ecosystem econometrics.
The statement's core message is precisely framed: assessing nature-based climate action without accounting for wild animals' role in ecosystems is scientifically incomplete. The researchers explicitly call for wildlife and its ecological functions to be integrated into Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and international frameworks like the Paris Agreement.
The statement emphatically clarifies what it is not: a substitute for fossil fuel emission reductions. Wildlife protection is supplementary, not a workaround. "We are not talking about using animals as carbon offsets," one involved researcher told Mongabay. "We are talking about making a solution visible that does not appear in climate plans at all."
In comparison: what current climate plans include and what they do not
Current national climate plans account for nature-based solutions primarily through two channels: forests (through programs like REDD+, which aims to reduce deforestation emissions) and coastal ecosystems like mangrove forests and seagrass meadows. Together these systems sequester billions of tonnes of CO2 annually.
Animals do not appear in this calculation. Not because their impact is deemed small, but because animals are methodologically difficult to capture in existing climate models. A forest's carbon sequestration can be measured by satellite. A wolf's contribution—regulating deer populations so trees are not stripped bare—must be derived through multiple ecosystem steps.
For scale: global CO2 emissions in 2024 reached roughly 37 billion tonnes. The 6.41 billion tonnes the Yale team calculated equals about 17 percent of annual emissions. This is substantial and simultaneously no substitute for structural decarbonization.
COP31 in Turkey: who acts next
The UN climate conference COP31 takes place in Antalya, Turkey, in November 2026. Organizations like the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and WWF are preparing briefings for government delegations. The consensus statement will serve as scientific foundation. Concrete NDC language explicitly including wildlife has not yet appeared in any major climate plan.
The European Union has already established a legally binding framework for ecosystem restoration through its Nature Restoration Law. Whether this extends to wildlife and flows into climate plans depends on whether the EU adopts the consensus statement as basis for concrete NDC language.