Strategies for Landscape-Scale Restoration in the Tropics

The Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) is a joint program of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), whose mission is to enhance environmental management and leadership capacity in the Neotropics and tropical Asia by offering capacity-building and networking opportunities to individuals whose decisions and actions influence the management of forests in working landscapes. A key mission of the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) is to help environmental leaders and practitioners learn about and engage in reforestation of degraded tropical lands. Unlike the industrial scale use of exotic tree species for reforestation, restoration of tree species native to a given region can promote greater biodiversity and ecosystem services. Individuals engaging in and researching native species reforestation are highly spread out around the world and work in many different capacities. The objective of the Tropical Native Species Reforestation Information Clearinghouse (TRIC) is to combine the information gleaned from different sectors throughout Latin America and tropical Asia into a single searchable database. These entries provide information about literature and projects for use by environmental practitioners, scientists, and leaders worldwide.

From January 26 to 28, 2012, the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters convened practitioners and researchers from government, academia, and environmental and development institutions from around the globe for information exchange on challenges and emerging strategies in scaling-up restoration in the tropics to provide ecosystem services and benefit biodiversity and local livelihoods. The three-day conference took place in Kroon Hall at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) in New Haven, Connecticut.

Considerable reforestation was undertaken around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, very large areas of degraded land and forest still remain present across the tropics. Indeed, these areas continue to increase. Several countries do have experience in undertaking large-scale reforestation including Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. There are lessons to be learned from their experiences but not simple recipes for others to follow. Ecological and socio-economic differences mean that those undertaking reforestation must adjust their approaches to suit the circumstances present in particular locations. The task is made even more difficult because the conditions under which future reforestation might be undertaken are changing. For example, there is uncertainty about the availability of land (because of the need for increased food production), the impact of urbanization, the future markets for forest products and ecosystem services and about how to establish forests able to adapt to a changing climate. Given this background, several policy issues need resolution if reforestation is to be undertaken on a large scale. These include deciding (i) how much reforestation should be undertaken in particular landscapes, (ii) just where in these landscapes this should be done, (iii) the types of reforestation to be carried out in these different areas, (iv) who should make these decisions, and (v) how reforestation should be implemented. All of this means there is a rich field of study for silviculturalists wishing to look beyond establishing simple monocultures of fast-growing exotic species. Silvicultural systems designed for industrial timber plantations are not necessarily those suited to overcoming forest and land degradation where a variety of stakeholders are involved and where these stakeholders are interested in the provision of ecosystem services as well as (or instead of) goods such as timber. It also means that foresters will have to bridge the divide between the natural or physical sciences and the social sciences rather better than has been done in the past. I will highlight some of the key questions (though not necessarily the answers) that I think deserve more attention than they have received hitherto.

The conference’s concluding panel discussion among all panelists, which served to synthesize conference outcomes and set steps for moving forward with priorities for realizing landscape-scale restoration.

In this paper we discuss two specific inputs aimed to increase restoration success in Eastern and Southern Africa. While deforestation in this part of Africa has been severe it is also an area that is blessed with old maps and nursery entrepreneurs. Obviously successful restoration requires that a whole range of technical and socioeconomic conditions are fulfilled, but here we will concentrate on two neglected areas that could have profound influence on restoration success. Restoration of ecosystems and ecological communities requires development of a strong theoretical base. But most often landscapes are described by ecoregional classification with little possibility to transfer the general knowledge to physical landscapes, while detailed knowledge of small ares are not generalized to an understanding of how the ecological conditions vary across landscapes. However, old botanical maps produced around the time of independence of many African countries can provide this link between the general and the specific. Providing an understanding of successional pathways, alternative stable states, and ecotones. Restoration can be implemented as centralized restoration of protected areas or as part of decentralized collaborative forest management schemes. In both types of schemes seeds and seedlings need to be procured and distributed. Two practical requirements for implementation of restoration based on experience from agroforestry can inform on how this could be done on a large scale (i) Identifying suitable seed sources based on understanding potential provenance areas for species that have never been tested (basically all indigenous species), and (ii) public/private collaboration with decentralized small-scale private nursery entrepreneurs procuring and distributing seeds and seedlings for dispersed planting agents.

Many of the same criteria apply to forest restoration and community-based forest management--particularly in vulnerable tropical forests where the two are often closely intertwined. For GreenWood, these are best addressed through a suite of flexible tools that include: 1) Value-added markets; 2) Appropriate harvesting and production technologies; 3) Transparent, legal chain-of-custody; 4) Extensive consultation with local partners; and 5) Practical research that responds to local priorities. There is no cookie-cutter solution to every situation, but GreenWood applies a few basic principles that can help guide successful interventions.

4th Panel discussion moderated by Tim Rollinson, Director General of the U.K. Forestry Commission, Chair of the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration.

Forest landscape restoration seems to have become a new hype. Driven by climate change, there currently are many efforts to establish restoration projects across the globe. Biophysical and economic potentials are assessed, innovative financial mechanisms are developed, and ambitious targets are set to restore the world’s lost forests. However, landscape restoration is nothing new. People have always been constructing, re-constructing and restoring their landscapes, to safeguard their lives and livelihoods. A better understanding of these localized practices will help to better perceive, plan, and implement new restoration initiatives, and potentially scale up to higher levels of policy making. Understanding localized practice means firstly to understand how landscapes are historically shaped by people, through their sense of belonging, and deep attachment to their place. It is this sense of identity and ownership that forms the basis for agency and collective action, for landscape inhabitants to restore their degraded landscapes. Secondly, it means to understand how these endogenous landscape dynamics relate to governance. Landscapes are often cut across by administrative boundaries, not having a formal position in the political-administrative scaling of governance. This means that administratively steered planning processes do not make use of the endogenous agency of landscape inhabitants to govern their place. Thinking of governance from a landscape perspective however allows for a ‘specialization’ of governance, as a means to re-connect governance to landscape, citizenship to place. Adopting a landscape perspective to governance allows to cross administrative and political boundaries. It also allows a broader group of actors not only at the local level, but also at higher politics of scale to engage in governance and decision-making processes concerning their landscape. Such landscape governance does not mean adding an extra scale of formal political-administrative decision-making. But it does offer the opportunity to construct multiple scale networks within and between landscapes, for landscape learning to take place. This is the rationale behind the learning network, which is currently being constructed by the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration.

The Xingu is famous worldwide, not only for the Amazon forest and its border with the Brazilian savannah (called “Cerrado”), but for the cultural richness of its oldest inhabitants: 24 distinct indigenous ethnicities, who still live, drink, bathe and fish in Xingu’s water. The spread of soy and beef production during the last decades has left 300,000 hectares of degraded areas around rivers and water springs in the Xingu basin, threatening the survival of its original people and their health, as well as the economic viability of these new businesses. These areas are legally protected in Brazil: where native vegetation was cut, it must be restored. However, that is not what usually happens, mainly because seeds, seedlings and technology are still not available. The campaign Y Ikatu Xingu (“Save the Good Water of the Xingu”, in the local Kamaiura language) has been uniting indigenous peoples’ organizations, small farmers settled by agrarian reform, larger-scale farmers, governmental and non-governmental institutions since 2005 in one great effort for the restoration of riparian forests aiming for the conservation of the Xingu’s water. By working in a participatory way with different actors, new solutions for tropical forest restoration at the landscape-scale were developed. Our work has been communicated on national and local television channels, in newspapers and on the radio, as well as in local events promoted by churches, clubs, unions, schools and agribusiness companies, always including the local farmers who support “Muvuca”. This new way of forest restoration is becoming popular in the region, expanding steadily by 30-50% per year in planting area and metric tons of seeds planted. For making this amount of native seeds available, we helped create the Xingu Seeds Network, which brings together indigenous people and smallholders as seed collectors, selling native seeds from the Cerrado and Amazonia to farmers who need to restore riparian vegetation on their farmland. The Xingu Seeds Network has annual meetings to discuss maintenance and impacts of seed collection, storage techniques, organization and seed prices. The network is four years old and has generated US$250,000 in income for 300 local families, organized in 15 groups spanning a 400 kilometer radius, producing 53 tons of seeds of 203 different native species. To date, over 2,400 hectares in 21 municipalities have been restored through this campaign. Of those, 400 hectares were planted with seedlings, 1,000 hectares through exclusion and management of natural regeneration, and 1,000 hectares through mechanized direct sowing. The next challenges for the campaign now include the development of the native forest technology, legislation and economy, such as the organization of local productive systems, access to credit, infrastructure and marketing.

The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is one of the five top priority conservation areas in the world, due to its exceptional biological diversity, very high levels of endemism, and equally high levels of human pressure, hence a dramatically threatened future. In this scenario, conservation will not be enough to save most of the indigenous species of the Atlantic Forest, nor to maintain the flow and quality of ecosystem services. Consequently, ecological restoration will be required, and at a large scale. To achieve the expected targets, restoration efforts must be integrated with stakeholders and a fully mobilized society at large. Today, less than three years later after launching, Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact (AFRP), has almost 200 members including national and international NGOs, government, private companies, and research institutions. The AFRP’s mission is to integrate people and organizations to restore and reconnect the Atlantic Forest at a very large scale, and to protect the remaining forest fragments. The ambitious goal is to contribute to the restoration of 15 million hectares of Atlantic Forest by 2050 in order to recover at least 30% of the biome’s original area, with annual targets to be met, and on-going monitoring, evaluation, outreach, and reporting of results to be carried out. Currently, more than 40,000 ha of restoration projects are registered in the AFRP website. We have also produced i) a book describing the practical guidelines for restoring Brazilian Atlantic Forest, based on previous experiences and current scientific knowledge; ii) thematic maps to guide restoration efforts; as well as iii) a monitoring protocol. The spirit of cooperation and mobilization of the AFRP, combined with pragmatism, and technical, science-based methodologies developed in-situ, provide a template that could be adapted to other forest biomes in Brazil and, possibly, to other mega-diversity countries around the world.

There is a great deal of political momentum behind policy incentives to reduce deforestation and restore tropical ecosystems. New mechanisms, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation and other pro-forest activities (REDD+), may provide many opportunities for improved land use practices in the tropics. These policies and mechanisms could provide additional incentives for long-standing approaches such as community forestry, or may create new paradigms in economic development while avoiding deforestation. Before full implementation of REDD+ and other incentives can be achieved, scientific, political, and social challenges will need to be addressed. For example, the funding necessary for implementation must be generated. As these monetary incentives to implement REDD+ emerge, estimates of the extent of and which practices should be implemented where would help move political negotiations forward. Also, balancing development, the drivers of deforestation, and restoration opportunities will be critical for achieving social and environmental change in tropical countries. We will present analyses of secondary forests in the Amazon and our proposal for balancing the relationship between the drivers of tropical deforestation to contribute to this discussion. Finally, while the scope of REDD+ is set, it is unclear how many aspects of implementation will occur. We will provide an up-to-date report on progress of REDD+ at the Durban meeting of the United Nations climate negotiations.

3rd panel discussion moderated by Chadwick Dearing Oliver of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The municipality of São Felix do Xingu, in the Brazilian Amazon State of Para is considered a “deforestation Hotspot” due to the expansion and low efficiency of cattle raising. However, farms in the Amazon must have a minimum forest cover of 80% of the area of the property, according to the Brazilian forest law. In the other hand, agroforestry systems based on cocoa are indicated to decrease deforestation and recover degraded lands. IMAFLORA´s objective is to use the cocoa system to build a productive forest to restore and protect the ecosystem, aiming to raise the percentage of forest cover and contribute to the compliance of the forest law by smallholders. It has been done by building capacity in small holders of the local cooperative (CAPPRU). The goal is to improve production, conservation and organization practices by following the standards of the Sustainable Agriculture Network / the Rainforest Alliance Certified. The farmers were capacitated on structuring programs for conservation and restoration of native ecosystem in their properties and on quality improvement of the cocoa beans. Certification may lead to an economic premium paid for certified quality cocoa, which will be the incentive to the forest restoration viable. IMAFLORA´s project is impacting 2356,26 hectares on 37 small properties, with 53,8% of the land used as pasture, 33,1% as conservation areas and 12,3% as cocoa fields.

2nd Panel discussion moderated by Cullman fellow, Jeff Stoike.

Tropical forest succession follows distinct pathways depending on prior land use, post-abandonment disturbance, faunal diversity, and the dynamics of the surrounding landscape. These distinct pathways determine rates of change in species composition, forest structure, and ecosystem processes. Metrics of “success” during forest regrowth are largely determined by values of different stakeholders. Conservation biologists value regrowth as habitats for endemic species and forest specialists. Local people value regrowth for numerous ecosystem products and services. Ecotourists value regrowth forests for recreation and viewing wildlife. Today, most successional forests in the tropics were not planned and few are being actively managed. Expanding the future value of successional forests for conserving biodiversity, providing ecosystem services, and supporting rural livelihoods will require developing new insights into the socio-ecological drivers of forest regrowth across different regions of the tropics.

Two of the main barriers to adoption of small scale forestry by smallholders and indigenous communities in Panama are 1. The lack of revenue generated by the stands early on, and 2. Resistance to new management models. Planting Empowerment (PE) partners with indigenous communities and individual smallholders to cultivate mixed-species plantations that generate short term economic benefits and preserve traditional practices.

BARCA is a company that works in reforestation and also in restoration in the Central American tropics. Its main restoration projects have been with mix native valuable forest species planted in mosaic patterns and also in mixed planting designs. An example of these is the “BIRDS Project”, established in the years of 1995 to 2000, in the Central Pacific Region of Costa Rica. With and NGO in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, BARCA has also participated in restoration through “enrichment strips” of native precious forest species. In the Darien Region of Panama, BARCA is establishing a restoration project in an autonomous indigenous area (“Comarca Kuna de Madugandí”). In this Comarca the restoration needs to fulfill several necessities for its habitants, (fire wood, sawn wood and construction material etc.), and a “polycyclic harvesting” of planted and regenerated forest species approach was designed. This project started in 2011.

1st Panel discussion moderated by Cullman Fellow, Alder Keleman.

Quintana Roo, Mexico is more than 70% forested and harbors important populations of jaguar, tapir, monkeys and pumas. Most forest land is held communally, through ejidos (land grants to groups) that range in size from about 4000 ha to more than 70,000 ha. More than 150 ejidos manage their forests harvesting mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) and a variety of other species to sell as timber. Outside their forest areas, communities practice slash and burn agriculture to produce corn, beans and squash for subsistence. Sustaining the forest and its biodiversity depends on sustaining its value, so regenerating commercial species is a key to forest conservation. However, selective timber harvesting does not create favorable regeneration conditions for a sun-loving species like mahogany. To evaluate silvicultural options for forest regeneration, 24 ½ ha experimental clearings were created in community forests using slash and burn agriculture, mechanical clearing or felling. Results 10 years later revealed that the best treatment for mahogany was slash and burn agriculture, which favored the highest growth. Seed fall from neighboring trees of other species has transformed these former clearings into diverse young forests. An evaluation at 11 years revealed that 80 tree species had become established on former slash and burn clearings. A total of 39% of the basal area on these clearings was made up of commercial hardwoods. These species accounted for only 6% of the basal area on the previously felled clearings, where less valuable softwoods accounted for 20% of the basal area. Slash and burn agriculture is compatible with forestry, and contributes to the restoration of diverse stands. The challenge is convincing forest managers that agriculture can be integrated into forest management.

Despite increasing loss and degradation of tropical rainforest, conservationists frequently overlook the ability of disturbed forest to conserve biodiversity. Restoring degraded forest requires understanding how land-use history and subsequent management affects forest succession and regrowth. The purpose of this study was to evaluate long-term forest dynamics in Kibale National Park, Uganda to 1) examine patterns in forest change and 2) evaluate how regenerating forest can provide food for five primate species. We used data collected for up to 39 years on tree species and size in four unlogged sites and eight degraded sites regenerating after burning, farming, logging, or reforesting with native or exotic trees. We calculated changes in tree species diversity and structure within and between sites and over time, using statistical clustering to identify similarities. We used existing relationships between tree size and the abundance of leaves and fruit to calculate to what degree forests with different land use histories can feed provide food for primates. Lightly logged forest had more similar species diversity and structure to unlogged forest than burned, farmed, heavily logged, or reforested sites. Surprisingly, some regenerating forest can support substantial primate populations: at present sites excluded from fire for 17 years provide more primate food than those replanted with native trees 15 years ago. Forty years after harvest, lightly logged forest provides equal food to unlogged forest while heavily logged forest does not. Taken together, our results indicate that land managers can use a variety of passive and active strategies to direct succession in degraded tropical forest and accelerate restoration. The foresight to plant food trees will be particularly important to conserve target or endangered animal populations.

Silvopastoral systems (SPS) enhance milk and meat production, reduce costs and are instrumental for the productive rehabilitation of degraded lands. Intensive silvopastoral systems (ISS) combine fodder shrubs planted at high densities (> 10,000 plants ha-1), trees and improved pastures. The scaling-up of such systems requires incentives to address financial and knowledge barriers, as demonstrated by the Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Approaches to Ecosystem Management pilot project. The lessons learned from this project are now being applied in the Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Sustainable Cattle Ranching Project, which will scale-up the adoption of SPS in Colombia in order to improve natural resource management, enhance environmental services, and raise productivity in participating farms. The five regions targeted by the project were selected for their proximity to strategic ecosystems and protected areas, and it is expected that increasing connectivity within them will safeguard globally important biodiversity. Two main components of the project aim at: (1) improving productivity in participating farms by establishing SPS, and (2) increasing connectivity and reducing land degradation through differentiated payment for environmental services (PES) schemes. Short-term PES will be given to land uses with high biodiversity that are profitable in the medium and long term (i.e. live fences, windbreaks, and trees in pastures). Land uses that foster high biodiversity but are not profitable (i.e. forests, connectivity corridors and wetlands) will receive short term payments by the project, and additional funding sources will be explored to guarantee long-term PES. The direct payment through the project is intended to increase tree cover in pasture landscapes and stimulate the maintenance and restoration of native forests. The project expects to preserve 5,000 ha of forests within farms, and to establish 15,750 ha of connectivity corridors and 45,000 ha of SPS; including 12,000 ha of ISS promoted through credit, technical assistance and economic incentives.

Forests are the cornerstone of the entire landscape, which includes wetlands, agriculture, mountains, drylands, rivers, biodiversity and people. Landscape restoration and sustainable forest management can only be achieved when all stakeholders, including governments, private institutions and local communities, work together using a cross-sectoral, cross-institutional strategy at a landscape level. The challenge is to explore institutional arrangements that are better suited to each country’s dynamic conditions, as there is no one-size-fits-all solution. At the global launch of the International Year of Forests in 2011, Rwanda announced its plan and commitment for achieving border-to-border landscape restoration over the next 25 years. This would be the first time that such a project encompasses an entire country - and the “landscape” includes not only forests, but trees as part of agriculture, subsistence agriculture planning, including terracing, protection of water resources, and the importance of wetlands and other ecosystem planning for all these purposes, including hydrology. This comprehensive landscape approach is the future. In China’s Loess Plateau, innovative action regenerated a barren landscape that had been degraded from centuries of unsustainable agriculture. Communities worked to replace overgrazing with terrace-building and tree planting practices. Within a decade, the dry, dusty plateau has become a mixed green landscape of forests and fields, an incredible feat of recovery for an area the size of Belgium, approximately 640,000 square kilometers. Moreover, this restoration contributed to lifting 2.5 million people out of poverty. “Forests for People” was the theme of the International Year of Forests 2011 (Forests 2011) and continues to be the focus of the UNFF secretariat’s outreach activities. This year has inspired afforestation and reforestation projects worldwide, including changes to agricultural practices in rural communities and forest management.

An introduction to the three-day conference convening world leaders on forest restoration by the Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.