Enhancing climate change resilience of ecological restoration — A framework for action

Abstract

Ecological restoration is a tool for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and yet its outcomes are susceptible themselves to climate change impacts. Drawing on the literature documenting this in theory and practice, we present a comprehensive overview of climate change risks and considerations across the whole life cycle of a restoration initiative. The resulting framework identified seven areas of restoration design and implementation in which climate change is important to address: setting restoration objectives, selecting sites and managing connectivity, choosing target species and ecosystems, managing key ecosystem interactions and micro-climates, identifying and mitigating site-level climate change risks, aligning the project with long-term policies, and designing a monitoring framework that enables adaptive management. A scan of restoration projects focussing on two regions – Brazil and countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN – revealed limited inclusion of these considerations in practice, with less than 5% of the projects evidently addressing at least one of the seven areas. We discuss two projects showing good practice in climate resilient restoration: restoration of Atlantic forest in Brazil that plans for climate change in connectivity and hydrological management, species selection, and policy alignment, and crayweed underwater forest restoration in Sydney, Australia, whose careful attention to species provenance, genotype measurement and monitoring provided a “future-proofing” approach to restoration success in the long term. Building on such examples, our framework can be used as a tool to support global restoration targets and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 through more climate resilient restoration.