Abstract
ContextAfforestation is one of the major drivers of land cover change in the world. In spite of its multiple applications, forest generation has been fostered during the last century to achieve few specific objectives such as timber production or catchment erosion protection. However, new afforestation programs are required to meet multiple objectives such as carbon sequestration, reducing environmental risks and enhance biodiversity conservation to reach sustainability.ObjectivesAssessing the general efficiency of past large-scale afforestation programs on the provision of ecosystem services (ES) and other socio-ecological attributes. We also determined whether this efficiency depended on the type of ecosystem used for comparison.MethodsWe carried out a semi-quantitative meta-analysis from 75 studies analyzing the effects of 128 afforestation actions developed in one of the EU countries with larger areas of afforested land during the twentieth century.ResultsSpanish afforestation policy improved timber provision and carbon sequestration. However, our results show that afforestation programs did not enhance regulating ES when compared to natural land plots, but only when compared to highly degraded areas prior to restoration actions.ConclusionsLarge-scale afforestations have difficulties in assuring the provisioning of regulating ES and the conservation of biodiversity when only productivity criteria are prioritized. Our results suggest the need for an afforestation agenda that embraces more comprehensive landscape management approaches that allow reducing undesired ES trade-offs while getting multiple objectives from different ecosystems.
Highlights
Forests cover approximately 42 million km2 on Earth, which represents one-third of the world’s land area (Bonan 2008)
Our results show that afforestation programs did not enhance regulating ecosystem services (ES) when compared to natural land plots, but only when compared to highly degraded areas prior to restoration actions
Our results suggest the need for an afforestation agenda that embraces more comprehensive landscape management approaches that allow reducing undesired ES tradeoffs while getting multiple objectives from different ecosystems
Summary
Forests cover approximately 42 million km on Earth, which represents one-third of the world’s land area (Bonan 2008). They play a critical role in the regulation of climate and hydrological cycles, preservation of biodiversity and soil resources and provision of food, medicines or recreational values. First forest transitions started during the last centuries in many countries of the northern hemisphere (e.g., Alvarez-Martınez et al 2014) These transitions have been mainly driven by spontaneous revegetation, and by local afforestation programs as societies undergo economic development, industrialization and urbanization (Mather 1992; Rudel et al 2005). Tree cover can take many forms, with completely different effects on ES supply and biodiversity (Lamb 2014; Veldman et al 2015)
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