The Role of Crop Production in the Forest Landscape Restoration Approach—Assessing the Potential Benefits of Meeting the Bonn Challenge

Alessandro De Pinto,Richard Robertson,Ho-Young Kwon,Nicola Cenacchi,Jawoo Koo,Timothy Thomas,Salome Begeladze,Chetan Kumar

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2020.00061

Abstract

Keywords: Forest Landscape Restoration1, Land Degradation2, Bonn Challenge3, Food Security4, Climate Change5.Existing approaches and methodologies that investigate effects of land degradation on food security vary greatly. Although a relatively rich body of literature that investigates localized experiences, geophysical and socioeconomic drivers of land degradation, and the costs and benefits of avoiding land degradation already exists, less rigorously explored are the global effects of restoring degraded landscapes for the health of the land, the climate, and world food security global effects of restoring degraded landscapes. The current scale of land degradation is such that the problem can be meaningfully addressed only if local successes are upscaled and a large number of landowners and land managers implement restoration activities. Significant global efforts to address degradation exist, but studies that evaluate the global benefits of these efforts generally do not account for global market forces and the complex web of relationships that determine the effects of wide-scale restoration on production and food security. This paper provides important insights into how a full integration of crop production in restoration efforts could impact food production levels, food availability, forest carbon stocks and Greenhouse gas emissions.

Highlights

Land degradation has multiple and complex impacts on the global environment through a range of direct and indirect processes that affect a wide range of ecosystem services and livelihoods (Nkonya et al, 2016)
Even though land and soil degradation is widespread and occurs globally (Nkonya et al, 2011, 2016), research and projects have focused mostly on arid, semiarid, and dry subhumid areas, with particular attention paid to the susceptibility of such ecosystems to desertification (Lu et al, 2007)
Research and onthe-field activities to prevent forest degradation and promote restoration have instead concentrated mostly on tropical forests, where important changes are taking place. The magnitude of these changes is important: ∼100 million hectares of tropical forest were converted to farmland between 1980 and 2012 (Gibbs et al, 2010; Hansen et al, 2013), and between 2000 and 2005 selective logging was estimated to have affected about 20 percent of tropical forests (Asner et al, 2005)

Summary

Introduction

Land degradation has multiple and complex impacts on the global environment through a range of direct and indirect processes that affect a wide range of ecosystem services and livelihoods (Nkonya et al, 2016). Some estimates indicate that land degradation has reduced productivity on 23% of the global land surface (Díaz et al, 2019) and that more than 3.2 billion people are affected by it (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), 2017). Research and onthe-field activities to prevent forest degradation and promote restoration have instead concentrated mostly on tropical forests, where important changes are taking place. The magnitude of these changes is important: ∼100 million hectares of tropical forest were converted to farmland between 1980 and 2012 (Gibbs et al, 2010; Hansen et al, 2013), and between 2000 and 2005 selective logging was estimated to have affected about 20 percent of tropical forests (Asner et al, 2005). In addition to biodiversity loss and soil degradation, is responsible for significant amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Henders et al, 2015; Busch et al, 2019)

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