LB 37-314 - CANCELLED - Forest restoration practices across Latin America

With the launch of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, diverse forest restoration initiatives are being scaled-up globally in an effort to meet a host of environmental and socioeconomic concerns. Tropical forests have drawn particular attention as reflected by extensive pledges for restoration made by governments across Latin America. Along with international and government organizations, a myriad of entities such as NGOs, companies, investors, communities, and private individuals are launching or supporting their own forest restoration projects across this region. Understanding the objectives that drive these efforts, the scale of implementation strategies, implementation costs, and the extent to which outcomes are being monitored can provide useful insights for scaling and improving the efficiency of forest restoration efforts. To this end, we disseminated a structured questionnaire to ~860 publicly visible organizations engaged in restoration of forests, woodlands, agricultural landscapes, savannas, and mangroves. Respondents included 165 individuals with distinct active projects from 157 organizations in 14 countries in continental Latin America. Respondents provided details on programs in 14 biomes, the majority of which were implemented in tropical and subtropical lowland and montane moist broadleaf forest followed by dry tropical and subtropical broadleaf forest biomes. We found that restoration activities were motivated by a range of interlinked objectives, led by conserving biodiversity (87%) and counteracting climate change (77%). The vast majority of practitioners (93%) were implementing multiple restoration interventions, many of which span a restoration intensity continuum (23%). The vast majority of organizations engaged in some type of tree planting (93%), but also used natural regeneration (61%) followed by enrichment planting, agroforestry, and direct seeding among other approaches. High intensity, high-cost interventions were implemented less frequently and at smaller scales while lower intensity approaches were implemented across a greater area when operating at larger scales. Implementation costs of growing trees through establishment averaged $4700/ha but were highly variable based on site-specific conditions. Notably, while nearly all organizations carried out some type of monitoring of restoration outcomes, monitoring costs exceeded those of installing the restoration intervention. Our results suggest that restoration efforts across Latin America include a diverse portfolio of interventions and take a pragmatic approach by implementing lower cost approaches when operating at larger scales. However, there remain significant mismatches between standard funding and the actual costs of tree growing and monitoring of restoration outcomes as well as a lack of alignment between the metrics monitored and the primary objectives of restoration efforts.