Researchers from 13 institutions studied an area of tropical forest in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, that was heavily logged in the 1980s and subsequently protected from further logging or conversion to plantation agriculture. They found that areas left to regenerate naturally recovered by as much as 2.9 tonnes of aboveground carbon per hectare of forest each year. This is important because it highlights that if degraded tropical forests are protected, they can recover well naturally.