Abstract
Restoration depends on purpose and context. At the core it entails innovation to halt ongoing and reverse past degradation. It aims for increased functionality, not necessarily recovering past system states. Location-specific interventions in social-ecological systems reducing proximate pressures, need to synergize with transforming generic drivers of unsustainable land use. After reviewing pantropical international research on forests, trees, and agroforestry, we developed an options-by-context typology. Four intensities of land restoration interact: R.I. Ecological intensification within a land use system, R.II. Recovery/regeneration, within a local social-ecological system, R.III. Reparation/recuperation, requiring a national policy context, R.IV. Remediation, requiring international support and investment. Relevant interventions start from core values of human identity while addressing five potential bottlenecks: Rights, Know-how, Markets (inputs, outputs, credit), Local Ecosystem Services (including water, agrobiodiversity, micro/mesoclimate) and Teleconnections (global climate change, biodiversity). Six stages of forest transition (from closed old-growth forest to open-field agriculture and re-treed (peri)urban landscapes) can contextualize interventions, with six special places: water towers, riparian zone and wetlands, peat landscapes, small islands and mangroves, transport infrastructure, and mining scars. The typology can help to link knowledge with action in people-centric restoration in which external stakeholders coinvest, reflecting shared responsibility for historical degradation and benefits from environmental stewardship.
Highlights
With the Bonn Challenge (2011) [1], the New York Declaration on Forests (2014) [2] and the UNDecade on ecosystem restoration [3] launched in March 2019, forest and landscape restoration (FLR)is gaining traction on the global political agenda
Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) or public and private support for local initiatives). These interventions seek various entry points into Social-Ecological Systems other than directly addressing land cover, such as modified rights, enhanced know-how, supported markets, or incentive systems. These are always related to specific contexts that are in turn very diverse depending on the social-ecological system in place and its historical path-dependency
As typologies of goals and issues can be derived from other frameworks, such as the set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) targets and indicators, we focus here on the knowledge side of the interaction and on a combined typology of intervention options and contexts, within the main steps of issue cycles, as illustrated in Figure 1B [102]
Summary
With the Bonn Challenge (2011) [1], the New York Declaration on Forests (2014) [2] and the UN. As a first step toward such a typology of restoration as part of international agricultural research, three Common Research Programs (CRPs) of the CGIAR—Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM) and Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE)—conducted a joint stocktaking of CGIAR work on forest and landscape restoration [5] They covered a wide range of field projects and case studies, decision making supporting tools, modeling, mapping, conceptual approaches, and frameworks across the geographical area of interest of the CGIAR, i.e., the tropics and sub-tropics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Innovative restoration (or restorative innovation) reconciles historical path-dependency of the degraded status quo with forward-looking theories of induced change that are empirically grounded, rather than wish-lists of over-optimistic planners It requires science-based and across-scales diagnosis of the underlying causes (‘driving forces’) that shaped current context, mobilizing a wide range of conceptual frameworks to understand social-institutional constraints, drivers of change and sustainers of long-term action. A more incisive way of describing similarities and differences is needed
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