• Energy Research

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. 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.

Forests have re-taken centre stage in global conversations about sustainability, climate and biodiversity. Here, we use a horizon scanning approach to identify five large-scale trends that are likely to have substantial medium- and long-term effects on forests and forest livelihoods: forest megadisturbances; changing rural demographics; the rise of the middle-class in low- and middle-income countries; increased availability, access and use of digital technologies; and large-scale infrastructure development. These trends represent human and environmental processes that are exceptionally large in geographical extent and magnitude, and difficult to reverse. They are creating new agricultural and urban frontiers, changing existing rural landscapes and practices, opening spaces for novel conservation priorities and facilitating an unprecedented development of monitoring and evaluation platforms that can be used by local communities, civil society organizations, governments and international donors. Understanding these larger-scale dynamics is key to support not only the critical role of forests in meeting livelihood aspirations locally, but also a range of other sustainability challenges more globally. We argue that a better understanding of these trends and the identification of levers for change requires that the research community not only continue to build on case studies that have dominated research efforts so far, but place a greater emphasis on causality and causal mechanisms, and generate a deeper understanding of how local, national and international geographical scales interact.

Tropical reforestation (TR) has been highlighted as an important intervention for climate change mitigation because of its carbon storage potential. TR can also play other frequently overlooked, but significant, roles in helping society and ecosystems adapt to climate variability and change. For example, reforestation can ameliorate climate‐associated impacts of altered hydrological cycles in watersheds, protect coastal areas from increased storms, and provide habitat to reduce the probability of species' extinctions under a changing climate. Consequently, reforestation should be managed with both adaptation and mitigation objectives in mind, so as to maximize synergies among these diverse roles, and to avoid trade‐offs in which the achievement of one goal is detrimental to another. Management of increased forest cover must also incorporate measures for reducing the direct and indirect impacts of changing climate on reforestation itself. Here we advocate a focus on “climate‐smart reforestation,” defined as reforesting for climate change mitigation and adaptation, while ensuring that the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on reforestation are anticipated and minimized.

We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring forest and landscape restoration requires additional approaches to defining and assessing forests that reveal the qualities and trajectories of forest patches in a spatially and temporally dynamic landscape matrix. New technologies and participatory assessment of forest states and trajectories offer the potential to operationalize such definitions. Purpose-built and contextualized definitions are needed to support policies that successfully protect, sustain, and regrow forests at national and global scales. We provide a framework to illustrate how different management objectives drive the relative importance of different aspects of forest state, dynamics, and landscape context.