Rewilding Tropical Forest Landscapes: A Win-Win Solution for People and the Planet

Tuesday - January 9 2024, 17:41 UTC - 10 months ago

Tropical forests are crucial for regulating Earth's climate and biodiversity, yet they are being destroyed at an alarming rate for agricultural purposes. Reforestation projects that involve local communities and provide incentives for sustainable land management can not only combat climate change, but also benefit the people living in these landscapes.

Tropical forest landscapes are home to millions of Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers. Just about every square meter of land is spoken for, even if claims are not formally recognized by governments.These local landholders hold the key to a valuable solution as the world tries to slow climate change – restoring deforested tropical landscapes for a healthier future.Tropical forests are vital to Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but a soccer field-size area of mature tropical forest is burned or cut down about every 5 seconds to clear space for crops and cattle today .

While those trees may be lost, the land still has potential. Tropical forests’ combination of year-round sunshine and high rainfall can lead to high growth rates, suggesting that areas where tropical forests once grew could be valuable sites for reforestation. In fact, a host of international agreements and declarations envision just this.For reforestation projects to make a dent in climate change, however, they have to work with and for the people who live there .

As forest ecologists involved in tropical forest restoration, we have been studying effective ways to compensate people for the ecosystem services flowing from their land. In a new study, we show how compensation that also allows landholders to harvest and sell some of the trees could provide powerful incentives and ultimately benefit everyone.The extraordinary value of ecosystem servicesTropical forests are celebrated for their extraordinary biodiversity, with their preservation seen as essential for protecting life on Earth .

They are reservoirs of vast carbon stocks, slowing down climate change. However, when tropical forests are cleared and burned, they release copious amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that drives climate change.Programs offering payments for ecosystem services are designed to help keep those forests and other ecosystems healthy by compensating landholders for goods and services produced by nature that are often taken for granted .

For example, forests moderate stream flows and reduce flood risks, support bees and other pollinators that benefit neighboring croplands, and help regulate climate.In recent years, a cottage industry has grown up around paying people to reforest land for the carbon it can hold. It has been driven in part by corporations and other institutions looking for ways to meet their commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions by paying projects to reduce or prevent emissions elsewhere .

Early iterations of projects that pay landholders for ecosystem services have been criticized for focusing too much on economic efficiency, sometimes at the expense of social and environmental concerns.Win-win solutions – where environmental and social concerns are both accounted for – may not be the most economically efficient in the short term, but they can lead to longer-term sustainability as participants feel a sense of pride and responsibility for the project’s success .

That longer-term sustainability is essential for trees’ carbon storage, because many decades of growth is required to build up stored carbon and combat climate change.