Upscaling tropical restoration to deliver environmental benefits and socially equitable outcomes

Abstract

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration offers immense potential to return hundreds of millions of hectares of degraded tropical landscapes to functioning ecosystems. Well-designed restoration can tackle multiple Sustainable Development Goals, driving synergistic benefits for biodiversity, ecosystem services, agricultural and timber production, and local livelihoods at large spatial scales. To deliver on this potential, restoration efforts must recognise and reduce trade-offs among objectives, and minimize competition with food production and conservation of native ecosystems. Restoration initiatives also need to confront core environmental challenges of climate change and inappropriate planting in savanna biomes, be robustly funded over the long term, and address issues of poor governance, inadequate land tenure, and sociocultural disparities in benefits and costs. Tackling these issues using the landscape approach is vital to realising the potential for restoration to break the cycle of land degradation and poverty, and deliver on its core environmental and social promises. ll

The biodiversity and ecosystem service contributions and trade-offs of forest restoration approaches

“…We further assess how variation in the relative performance of tree plantations versus native forests may be explained by plantation features and biophysical conditions. Our study aims to enable forest restoration to achieve cobenefits in addressing today’s multiple environmental challenges ( 4 ), including the dual climate and biodiversity crises ( 8 , 17 ). By simultaneously considering the performance of forests in carbon, soil, water, and biodiversity (i.e., environmental outcomes) in addition to performance in wood production, our study also provides a critical assessment of the trade-offs likely to confront forest restoration decision makers.…”

“…A s the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration gets underway (1), forest restoration on degraded and deforested land is being scaled up globally, with farreaching environmental and social implications (2)(3)(4). The Bonn Challenge, for example, has pledged to restore 350 million hectares of land by 2030 (5), and many other initiatives are similarly ambitious (6,7).…”

Actions to halt biodiversity loss generally benefit the climate

“…Reforestation or restoration of degraded forests and woodlands with indigenous species plays a role in addressing losses of biodiversity and NCP, including through recovering the soil carbon stocks of these ecosystems (e.g. Edwards et al, 2021 ; Sileshi, 2016 ), and by targeting spatial spots that allow to re‐establish forest habitat continuity with additional positive impacts (e.g. Atlantic Forest; Newmark et al, 2017 ; Strassburg et al, 2018 ).…”

Nine actions to successfully restore tropical agroecosystems

“…Ecological restoration has great potential to reverse the detrimental effects of ecosystem degradation, by enhancing habitat structural complexity [4], benefitting biodiversity [5][6][7][8][9], improving levels of ecosystem functioning and delivery of ecosystem services [5,[8][9][10][11], and mitigating the effects of climate change [12], while also improving socioeconomic conditions and well-being [13]. Welldesigned restoration approaches can deliver multiple ecological and socioeconomic benefits synergistically [12,14,15]. Owing to this, the UN has declared 2021-2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration: a rallying call to heal our planet (https://www.decadeonrestoration.org).…”

“…Although agricultural production is essential to maintaining food security and improving livelihoods [26], it is also a principal driver of ecological degradation [25] and can contribute to socioeconomic inequity, social conflict, and declines in human well-being [25]. Restoration may have the potential to reduce or reverse many of the negative ecological and social impacts of increased production [8,15].…”