The response of geographical processes to landscape restoration: China’s research progress

Abstract

The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) provides a new momentum for scaling up ecosystem restoration efforts to landscape restoration. China’s recent experience with transformative investment in landscape restoration provides invaluable guidance for the world. We retrospectively reviewed the scientific evidence on the responses of physical, ecological, and social processes to China’s landscape restoration under geographic heterogeneity and obtained four experiences and lessons. First, China’s forest landscape restoration has successfully promoted vegetation growth and enlarged the carbon sink. Second, landscape restoration has reduced the local water yield, while the regional responses of rainfall are still not clear. Third, the local conditions of soil erosion and habitat quality were largely improved by landscape restoration, while the decreases in soil moisture and streamflow demonstrated significant trade-offs among ecosystem services. Last, geographical differentiation existed in the local responses of livelihoods to landscape restoration strategies, and the win‒win solutions between human development and nature improvement under different landscape contexts were still uncertain. We summarize three additional questions as future prospects: what is the scale of the thresholds to prevent overshoot and cascading negative ecological effects? what are people’s prior needs from nature? considering that there may be no universal win‒win pathways, how to promote co-benefits based on regional human–nature relationships?

Ecological restoration in Tibet optimises the cognitive structures of stakeholders on social‐ecological systems

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“…Satellite data have shown that ecological restoration projects play a significant role in increasing global vegetation cover, particularly through afforestation efforts in forests and croplands (Chen et al, 2019; Piao et al, 2020). Such restoration projects can increase regional carbon stocks, mitigate climate change and global warming, and prevent soil erosion (Huang et al, 2023; Liu et al, 2023). However, they also have some potential risks, including a significant reduction in runoff owing to plant interception and an increased risk of drought resulting from increased evapotranspiration from afforestation (Ma et al, 2023; Zhou et al, 2023).…”