Forests play a key role in stabilizing the Earth's climate. The establishment of protected areas (PAs) is one approach to forest conservation, but PAs have rarely been established to mitigate climate change. The global impact of PA on the carbon cycle has not previously been quantified due to the lack of accurate carbon stock maps at the global scale. Here, we used ~412 million lidar samples from NASA's GEDI mission to estimate a total PA stock of aboveground carbon (C) of 61.43 Gt (+/− 0.31), 26 % of all mapped terrestrial woody C. Of this total, 9.65 + /− 0.88 Gt of additional carbon was attributed to the PA state. (L. Duncanson ,M. Liang, A. Zvoleff )

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