Symposium

Overview of societal challenges.

In this presentation, I will discuss nature conservation in the context of the global land rush (green grab?). What kind of competing claims do we see and what are the socio-economic implications for local development?

What forests are we trying to restore? And what benefits are we aiming to deliver? It is important to understand alternative aspirations and motivations to avoid conflict, understand trade-offs and maximise synergies.

A multitude of stakeholders are engaged when it comes to restoring forested landscapes: governments (at all levels), communities, individual landowners, companies, NGOs, among others. All too often those deciding to restore forested landscapes are not those having to pay the opportunity costs for restoring the landscape. And all too often those restoring forested landscapes might not have the same rationale and objectives for restoring the landscape as those living in it.

Forests across the world stand at the crossroad. Climate change and land use change will shape their future. Agriculture is the main driver of deforestation, with differing regional trends: ranching in Amazonia, shifting cultivation in Africa and smallholder farming linked to industrial plantations in Asia. The wealth of data now available and the existence of real-time tracking capacities have enhanced widespread global awareness and concern for these issues. Multiple initiatives are happening worldwide. International bodies, governments, civil society and private actors have multiplied the pledges to stop deforestation and to restore forest landscapes. Yet despite global efforts, forest loss, fragmentation and land degradation continue unabated, reaching a critical point. Why? Why are policies designed to halt deforestation and increase restoration of forest landscapes failing? I propose that a key reason for this ineffectiveness lies in a failure to recognise the agency of the stakeholders involved and the adaptive capacities of the systems we seek to steer. Landscapes do not happen. They are made. They are the result of the sum of individual actions and decisions made by all stakeholders, and the interactions between these and biophysical processes. Likewise, forest transitions are not ecological, but social and behavioural, a product of the way that humans manage ecosystems. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of why current policies and initiatives to halt forest degradation and foster forest restoration fail, and suggest possible solution pathways to overcome key current barriers. I will defend that we need mental models and policies that better take into account local needs and aspiration, beliefs and constraints.

More often than not, scaling up is riddled with multilevel governance and institutional bottlenecks as well as lack of cross-sectoral coordination. I will present the results of recent socio-ecological assessments across Latin-American countries that highlight current constraints and propose ways for facilitating upscaling for effective implementation at various levels.

Many countries have pledged to restore huge areas of degraded land under new global and regional initiatives - this offers the promise of increasing the productivity of forests, crop and other lands, leading to multiple benefits, such as greater food security, poverty reduction and improved livelihoods, while improving ecosystem services at landscape level and reducing the pressure for further land degradation and deforestation. This presentation will explore some of the current obstacles and challenges to achieving large scale restoration and will suggest ways to overcome them. Issues include poor cross sectoral and inter-institutional collaboration, a lack of adequate financing and investment, and weak private sector involvement. The need to more systematically address some of the key risks to achieving not only restoration targets, but the expected positive long term impacts – social, environmental and economic – will be discussed. Experience to date of FAO’s Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism will be shared.

The talk presents key insights from a current project (TABEK) about concrete more effective, politically desirable and practicable options of Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) governance and finance. In the light of past experience with REDD+ and forest policies and considering various political, socio-economic and cultural conditions, different pathways for enhancing and maintaining high private sector engagement in FLR are elaborated.

River restoration projects tend to prioritize technical, engineering-based approaches to meet mostly consumption use demand. We demonstrate how a multi-scale iterative, interdisciplinary and collaborative restoration approach allows improving quality of life of citizens and securing the long-term provision of ecosystem services in a megacity of Asia.