Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay’s founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives, and story summaries.
Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent review published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether.
Forest restoration is at the heart of Target 2 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to place 30% of degraded ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030. But the gap between ambition and outcome is wide.
“Biodiversity will remain a vague buzzword rather than an actual outcome” unless projects explicitly prioritize it, caution the authors, led by Pedro Brancalion, a University of São Paulo researcher.
Restoration has typically prioritized utilitarian goals such as timber production, carbon sequestration or erosion control. This bias is reflected in the widespread use of monoculture plantations or low-diversity agroforests. Nearly half the forest commitments in the Bonn Challenge to restore degraded and deforested landscapes consist of commercial plantations of exotic species, a trend that risks undermining biodiversity rather than enhancing it.
Scientific evidence shows that restoring biodiversity requires more than planting trees. Methods like natural regeneration — allowing forests to recover on their own — can often yield superior biodiversity outcomes, though they face social and economic barriers. By contrast, planting a few fast-growing species may sequester carbon quickly but offers little for threatened plants and animals.
Biodiversity recovery is influenced by many factors: the intensity of prior land use, the surrounding landscape and the species chosen for restoration. Recovery is slow, often measured in decades, and tends to lag for rare and specialist species. Alarmingly, most projects stop monitoring after just a few years, long before ecosystems stabilize.
However, the authors say there are reasons for optimism. Biodiversity markets, including emerging biodiversity credit schemes and carbon credits with biodiversity safeguards, could mobilize new financing. Meanwhile, technologies like environmental DNA sampling, bioacoustics, and remote sensing promise to improve monitoring at scale.
To turn good intentions into reality, the paper argues, projects must define explicit biodiversity goals, select suitable methods and commit to long-term monitoring. Social equity must also be central.
“Improving the biodiversity outcomes of forest restoration … could contribute to mitigating power asymmetries and inequalities,” the authors write, citing examples from Madagascar and Brazil.
If designed well, forest restoration could help address the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. But without a deliberate shift, billions of dollars risk being spent on projects that plant trees — and little else.
Banner image: a graphic showing different methods of restoration and reforestation courtesy of Brancalion et al.
