Strategies for Landscape-Scale Restoration in the Tropics Yale International Society of Tropical Foresters

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.