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AbstractEl Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the main climate mode that drives the interannual variability in climate and consequently vegetation greenness. While widespread green‐up has been reported and examined in tropical America during El Niño, it remains unclear how vegetation in tropical Asia changes during the period. Here, we used four remote sensing‐based leaf area index (LAI) products to investigate changes in vegetation greenness during the 2015/16 El Niño in tropical Asia. We found a strong green‐up during the 2015/16 El Niño in tropical Asia, with its regional average LAI stronger than that of tropical America. The drivers for the green‐up vary across the region, with radiation being the main driver for continental tropical Asia, and temperature and soil water anomalies in the west and east parts of maritime tropical Asia, respectively. These findings provide important insights into the response of tropical Asia's vegetation to extreme climate anomalies.

AbstractA multitude of actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural and modified ecosystems can have co‐benefits for both climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Reducing greenhouse emissions to limit warming to less than 1.5 or 2°C above preindustrial levels, as outlined in the Paris Agreement, can yield strong co‐benefits for land, freshwater and marine biodiversity and reduce amplifying climate feedbacks from ecosystem changes. Not all climate mitigation strategies are equally effective at producing biodiversity co‐benefits, some in fact are counterproductive. Moreover, social implications are often overlooked within the climate‐biodiversity nexus. Protecting biodiverse and carbon‐rich natural environments, ecological restoration of potentially biodiverse and carbon‐rich habitats, the deliberate creation of novel habitats, taking into consideration a locally adapted and meaningful (i.e. full consequences considered) mix of these measures, can result in the most robust win‐win solutions. These can be further enhanced by avoidance of narrow goals, taking long‐term views and minimizing further losses of intact ecosystems. In this review paper, we first discuss various climate mitigation actions that evidence demonstrates can negatively impact biodiversity, resulting in unseen and unintended negative consequences. We then examine climate mitigation actions that co‐deliver biodiversity and societal benefits. We give examples of these win‐win solutions, categorized as ‘protect, restore, manage and create’, in different regions of the world that could be expanded, upscaled and used for further innovation.