Reforestation involves potential trade-offs: hard choices between environmental and social benefits, individual and community benefits, and among stakeholders who bear different costs and benefits. In this manuscript, we aim to show that successful long-term reforestation requires stakeholder engagement beyond planning stages and a recognition of the dynamism of stakeholder outlooks as stakeholders' opportunities, relationships, interests, and roles change over time. We first summarize lessons from recent literature on stakeholder involvement within reforestation efforts. We then present findings from a multiple-stakeholder workshop organized in west-central Mexico, in which we illustrate their choices on how to navigate trade-offs among different reforestation intervention strategies (agroforestry/ silvopastoral, natural regeneration, native species reforestation, commercial plantations). We confirm that individual stakeholders' circumstances, interests, and roles, as well as the contextual factors shaping them, are dynamic, continually changing the nature of the choices stakeholders face. Finally, we propose a four-phase pathway for addressing dynamic trade-offs and synergies in stakeholder participation in order to select, implement, and sustain successful reforestation activities. The pathway comprises four phases: (1) collaborate to devise a reforestation strategy through dialogue about dynamic trade-offs; (2) pledge robust stakeholder commitments to mutual arrangements for implementing reforestation; (3) implement reforestation interventions; and (4) adjust strategy through continuous evaluation of outcomes. We then elucidate how components of these four phases can be operationalized so that, on one side, scientists and practitioners might better understand the dynamic trade-offs reforestation poses for stakeholders, and on the other, stakeholders might balance their hard choices in ways that promote forest recovery.Abstract in Spanish is available with online material.
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Despite the economic and social costs of national and international efforts to restore millions of hectares of deforested and degraded landscapes, results have not met expectations due to land tenure conflicts, land-use transformation, and top-down decision-making policies. Privatization of land, expansion of cattle raising, plantations, and urbanization have created an increasingly competitive land market, dispossessing local communities and threatening forest conservation and regeneration. In contrast to significant investments in reforestation, natural regrowth, which could contribute to landscape regeneration, has not been sufficiently promoted by national governments. This study analyzes socio-ecological and economic vulnerabilities of indigenous and other peasant communities in the Mexican states of Veracruz, Chiapas, and Morelos related to the inclusion of natural regeneration in their forest cycles. While these communities are located within protected areas (Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve, Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, El Tepozteco National Park, and Chichinautzin Biological Corridor), various threats and vulnerabilities impede natural regeneration. Although landscape restoration involves complex political, economic, and social relationships and decisions by a variety of stakeholders, we focus on communities’ vulnerable land rights and the impacts of privatization on changes in land use and forest conservation. We conclude that the social, economic, political, and environmental vulnerabilities of the study communities threaten natural regeneration, and we explore necessary changes for incorporating this process in landscape restoration.
In this article we connect theoretically the concepts of structural vulnerabilities, recursive crises, and disasters through the linking-up of the COVID-19 pandemic with extreme hydrometeorological events in three municipalities in southern Yucatan, Mexico. The main research goal was to show the effects in productive and commercial systems in beekeeper and farmer households and their coping strategies to highlight the inter-relationships between historical vulnerabilities, crises, and disasters. The methodological approach included ethnographic fieldwork, 101 semi-structured interviews, and five focal groups. In the results, we reconstruct the agro-productive and commercial vulnerabilities built up since 1960 and contextualize the health and hydrometeorological crisis to show how some 87% of households suffered severe consequences to their incomes. The prices of main products (maize, fruit, honey) reached historically low levels as a result of conditions within local markets during the crisis. Half of the households surveyed had to make use of savings and more than 60% received no support from government or from development agencies. We conclude by pointing out the need for accompanying the design and implementation of community mitigation plans, which should take as a starting point the recovery of knowledge and local organization in order to demand from government co-managed, preventive programs, and capacities that would enable communities to confront increasing negative consequences in situations of global climate change and market instabilities in local peasant contexts. Our study aims to reach policy-makers, social organizations, and communities in order to highlight the importance of developing joint capabilities to respond to growing environmental, economic, and health vulnerabilities.
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