Forest landscape restoration: meeting national & international biodiversity commitmentsBiological diversity is the foundation of healthy, productive ecosystems, and forests hold most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity.

Global

No. 18, June 2017

Evidence suggests that a more diverse collection of plants and animals in an ecosystem is directly proportional to the quantity and stability of services it provides to people (Cardinale et al., 2012; Larsen et al., 2012). Biodiversity also supports the resilience of both natural and human-modified landscapes and their capacity to adapt; therefore, the protection and restoration of biodiversity at multiple scales acts as an ‘insurance policy’ against the impacts of climate change (Thompson et al., 2009).

Forests are home to 75% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity (FAO 2016), and they provide essential services, both provisioning (food, fuel wood, genetic diversity, etc.) and regulating (water purification, pollination, climate control, etc.). Forests also contain roughly 50% of global terrestrial biomass carbon stocks.

But many forests and forested landscapes are experiencing degradation. Restoring this deforested and degraded land can help reduce or eliminate many of the threats to species by providing sustainable resources and livelihoods that limit forest conversion and encroachment. Additionally, degraded landscapes that have the potential to support key habitats for threatened species can be restored in ways that not only increase the availability of critical habitat but also support sustainable human livelihoods.

Forest landscape restoration (FLR) is the process of regaining ecological functionality and enhancing human well-being across deforested or degraded forest landscapes. FLR actively brings people together to identify and implement appropriate and diverse restoration activities at a landscape scale, ranging from agroforestry to planting native tree species to watershed protection and more.

FLR is an important pathway for achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Paris Agreement and other climate change commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Land Degradation Neutrality goal, and other international commitments. Additionally, many FLR opportunities worldwide occur on or near agricultural areas. Restoration of degraded agricultural land in mosaic forest and agricultural landscapes represents a great opportunity for augmenting biodiversity through landscape-scale restoration.

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Black-capped Lory, IndonesiaPhoto: Intu Boedhihartono / IUCN

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Forest landscape restoration helps achieve biodiversity targetsFLR has emerged as a solution and implementation pathway for several of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Aichi Biodiversity Targets (IUCN 2016) (Figure 1). Specifically, FLR can help countries achieve Target 5 by reversing degradation and increasing the productivity of degraded land, thereby reducing pressures on key biodiversity areas (KBAs). By improving the resilience of landscapes and securing their ability to provide ecosystem services to people, FLR commitments made by countries can also contribute to Target 14. Target 15 benefits from FLR strategies that promote the planting of trees and woody plants that sequester carbon.

Restoration opportunities assessments have also identified and prioritised restoration planning in areas that are of specific concern to threatened species and biodiversity (Target 12) and have the capacity to develop restoration strategies that support the increase and maintenance of genetic diversity in cultivars (Target 13). Well-designed restoration interventions promote the use of locally-appropriate species as determined during the planning process. With appropriate planning it is also possible to ensure that restoration actions are not vectors for the establishment and spread of invasive alien species, and FLR may represent a critical opportunity to address the ongoing degradation of areas through restoration actions targeted at reducing or eliminating the persistence of invasives (Target 9). Finally, measuring the benefits of species diversity and the provision of ecosystem services from different land uses is one way to demonstrate the value of high biodiversity areas (Target 1).

Several countries have already recognised the synergy between their restoration commitments under the Bonn Challenge and their Aichi commitments and have begun incorporating FLR into their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), while others are already reporting progress on restoration actions in their National Progress Reports. Several others have included biodiversity as an explicit component in their identification of restoration opportunities.

The role of FLR in achieving the Aichi Targets was also highlighted by countries at the 2016 CBD negotiations in Cancun. This led to the adoption of a Short-term Action Plan on Ecosystem Restoration, focused on targets 5, 12, 14 and 15. The plan aims to facilitate ecosystem restoration across habitats including forests, for which it lays out four main groups of activities that could be carried out to accelerate implementation of restoration actions: assessment of opportunities for ecosystem restoration; improving the institutional enabling environment for these activities; planning and implementation of restoration activities; and monitoring, evaluation and dissemination of results.

Figure 1. The Aichi Targets (in bold) that can be addressed by integrating biodiversity considerations into restoration efforts.Source: https://www.cbd.int/sp/targets/

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What is the Bonn Challenge? The Bonn Challenge is a global effort to bring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land into restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. It has received unprecedented support since its inception in 2011, and as of May 2017, 44 governments, companies and associations have pledged to restore 150.03 million hectares of degraded land. Achieving the 2020 target will create approximately US$ 84 billion per year in net benefits that will bring direct additional income opportunities for rural communities. About 90% of this increased value is potentially tradable, meaning that it encompasses actual market-related benefits. Reaching the 2030 goal of 350 million hectares will generate about US$ 170 billion per year in net benefits from watershed protection, improved crop yields and forest products, and could annually sequester up to 1.7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Colombia’s National Policy for the Integrated Management of Biodiversity and its Ecosystem Services (NPIMBES), submitted to the CBD in 2012, included the restoration and rehabilitation of 280,000 hectares of land to connect biological corridors and preventing the deforestation of 200,000 hectares (out of 61 million hectares of natural forest).

In Peru, the government is focusing on reducing ecosystem degradation by 5% by 2021. By early 2017, Peru will have rolled out a national proposal to recover and restore all its ecosystems, supported by allocated budgets and detailed implementation plans. In addition, Peru is implementing a Forest Investment Programme that will incentivise the reduction of deforestation and forest degradation.

Mexico has identified over 850,000 hectares of degraded agricultural land in the Yucatan Peninsula (Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana Roo) where agroforestry interventions would support improved ecological function and contribute to the Aichi Targets. Specifically, an improved “milpa” agroforestry system would directly contribute to Targets 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14 and 15 across more than 700,000 hectares. These FLR improvements to degraded agricultural land have found financial support from the Mexican government, who have diverted a portion of agricultural subsidies to finance investments in novel FLR intervention activities on degraded agricultural land.

www.bonnchallenge.org

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Employing restoration strategies to meet biodiversity conservation objectives: Lessons from Malawi & ColombiaA primary framework for building a FLR programme from the ground-up is the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM), developed by IUCN and the World Resources Institute (WRI). The following examples highlight how ROAM is helping Malawi and Colombia enhance biodiversity through FLR.

Malawi’s restoration commitments aim to increase the productivity and resilience of landscapes for food security and the provision of ecosystem services, of which species compositions and interactions are a key part. Following a spatial analysis using ROAM, roughly 600,000 hectares of high priority restoration areas overlap with Malawi’s KBAs. These coinciding areas display the potential of Malawi to significantly contribute to their national and international biodiversity targets under the CBD through implementation of only a fraction of their 4.5 million hectare commitment to restoration under the Bonn Challenge.

Freshwater species also have tremendous potential to benefit from restoration. Of Malawi’s 250 threatened species, 119 are fish species endemic to Lake Malawi. Sedimentation is a key factor in the decline of more than half of these threatened fish species. FLR interventions that focus on reducing topsoil erosion and sedimentation in waterways would reduce the extinction pressure on these fish species and also have benefits such as an increase in the efficiency of hydropower facilities, for instance. In this manner, restoration can contribute directly to improving the hydropower economy and the continued survival of threatened species by reducing or eliminating the factors contributing to their decline. Monitoring and measuring the sediment export before and following restoration could provide a direct and measurable figure for the reduction of extinction threats for a majority of the threatened fish species in Lake Malawi.

In eastern Antioquia, Colombia, jaguars (Panthera onca) and puma (Puma concolor) are species of critical conservation importance, and their presence is a measure of the health of the ecosystem. These large-ranging carnivores are threatened by habitat fragmentation that brings them into close contact with humans and results in livestock predation. To address this, the Regional Environmental Authority in eastern Antioquia (Corporación Autónoma Regional de las Cuencas de los Ríos Negro y Nare – CORNARE), consolidated and coordinated an ecological corridor connecting protected areas under its jurisdiction. This involved enhancing the management of, and changing land-use patterns on, non-protected forest land. This has been embedded in the country’s ROAM process that identifies sustainable forest management techniques to maintain the composition and structure of the forest ecosystem while also preserving connectivity. Using reports of feline–human

conflict, CORNARE has verified where a puma or jaguar attacked livestock, and has designed these corridors as a conservation strategy and practical measure to prevent retaliation killings, and reduce the impact on poor households from the loss of livestock.

Jaguar. Photo: pixabay.com

How to emphasise biodiversity in restoration implementation

● Design restoration plans for functional landscapes that address multiple uses to streamline implementation of biodiversity, climate change, land degradation, sustainable development and FLR commitments;

● Highlight opportunities for local FLR interventions to complement national biodiversity conservation goals (e.g. identifying new sites important for threatened species adjacent to FLR opportunity areas or through restoring degraded areas important for biodiversity);

● Ensure that findings of restoration opportunities assessments are taken up in policies such as NBSAPs and other national plans; and

● Develop FLR monitoring protocols that include measures to track progress on biological intactness and associated ecosystem services.

How to emphasise biodiversity in restoration opportunity assessments

● Identify and demonstrate overlap among degraded areas suitable for FLR and areas important for biodiversity;

● Compile baseline information on condition and the degree of human intervention (intactness) of identified overlap sites using remote sensing data;

● Explicitly include biodiversity analysis and data such as from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in assessments of restoration opportunities;

● Ensure that processes and initiatives surrounding biodiversity conservation (i.e. NBSAPs) also participate in parallel FLR assessments and processes; and

● Utilise climate change models to generate up-to-date predictions on future landscape changes.

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Gathered edible plants, Thailand

Photo: Pauline Buffle / IUCN

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Sources ● Cardinale, B.J., et al. (2012). “Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity” Nature

486.7401 (2012): 59-67

● FAO (2016). State of the World’s Forests. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

● IUCN (2016). Restoration of forest ecosystems and landscapes as contribution to the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2016-078.pdf

● IUCN and WRI (2014). A guide to the Restoration Opportunities Assesment Methodology (ROAM): Assessing forest landscape restoration opportunities at the national or subnational level. Working paper (Road-test edition) Gland, Switzerland: IUCN

● Larsen, F.W., Turner, W.R. and Brooks, T.M. (2012). “Conserving Critical Sites for Biodiversity Provides Disproportionate Benefits to People.” PLoS ONE 7(5): e36971 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036971

● Thompson, I., Mackey, B., McNulty, S. and Mosseler, A. (2009). Forest Resilience, Biodiversity, and Climate Change. A synthesis of the biodiversity/resilience/stability relationship in forest ecosystems. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Montreal. Technical Series no. 43

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