Forest restoration in practice across Latin America

Abstract

Forest restoration is a promising solution to counteract climate change, biodiversity loss, and meet a host of socioeconomic objectives. While international initiatives highlight potential contributions of forest restoration as a win-win for people and nature, we lack detailed information on how frontline restoration practitioners are addressing this challenge on the ground. Here, we present a systematic assessment of motivations, scale, and costs of forest restoration implemented by 166 practitioners across 14 countries in Latin America. We found that forest restoration is motivated by interlinked objectives and accordingly, most restoration practitioners concurrently used multiple interventions spanning a range of intensity of inputs matched to the scale of individual projects. Project scale influenced strategy, with low-intensity interventions like natural regeneration implemented when operating at larger scales (≥500 ha). However, active tree planting remains the most frequently used intervention (included in >92 % of programs). Costs of establishing planted areas vary most broadly at the project level ($4445/ha ± 4841 over first 3 years) with little evidence of efficiencies of scale and with additional financial support ($964/ha/yr) required ~10 years past establishment. Moreover, monitoring added substantial additional costs, and we identified widespread misalignment between indicators measured and the most frequently expressed objective of restoring biodiversity. Our results emphasize that, while a promising range of new forest restoration interventions are being implemented across Latin America, lower-cost interventions, accessible and practical monitoring strategies, and better alignment between funding cycles and actual time frames required to achieve restoration objectives are urgently needed to support successful outcomes.