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Restoring degraded forests can help ensure food security, protect watersheds, improve rural livelihoods, tackle climate change, and conserve biodiversity. Photo credit: Rainforest Action Network

This post was co-written with Stewart Maginnis, head of IUCN's Forest Conservation Programme.

This week in Washington, D.C., members of the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration (GPFLR) met to advance strategies to restore degraded forest landscapes around the world. Such restoration has the potential to bring millions of hectares of land back to lifea move that could help protect watersheds, ensure food security, improve the livelihoods of rural communities, tackle climate change, and conserve biodiversity.

Forest landscape restoration is the process of regaining ecological functions and enhancing human well-being in deforested and degraded forest landscapes. It can include integrating trees into agricultural lands, restoring tracts of trees amidst a mosaic of farms and villages, recovering vast areas of intact forests, and more. Restoration can involve varying degrees of human interventionranging from actively planting trees to allowing natural processes of forest succession to occurand many things in between.

In 2011, WRI, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and research partners published Landscapes of Opportunity, the first global assessment of where forest landscape restoration might be possible. This map helped build momentum toward the Bonn Challenge, a global commitment to start restoring 150 million hectaresan area twice the size of Spainof lost and degraded forests by 2020.

Since then, several nationsranging from the United States to Rwandahave made Bonn Challenge restoration pledges, with pledges from others on the way. What some nations are asking now isnt what restoration is or where it is possible, but how can it be done successfully?

To help answer this question, WRI and IUCN assessed more than 20 examples from around the globe of forest landscape restoration over the past 150 years, including both relative successes and failures. Examples came from countries such as Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Niger, Panama, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United States. Lessons from these countries can not only provide insights into what works, but also inspire others to restore.

History tells us that large-scale forest landscape restoration is possible.

Costa Rica witnessed its tropical forest cover decline from 85 percent of its land area at the start of the 20th century to below 30 percent by 1987. Yet through a series of restoration effortssuch as innovative financing approaches, policy reforms, and technical assistance to landownersthe nations forest cover climbed back to about 50 percent by 2010. This significant restoration yielded a variety of benefitssuch as more forest products, ecotourism, and reduced soil erosionfor the nations environment, economy, and citizens.

South Korea restored its forests on a large scale after the Korean War. Between 1953 and 2007, forest cover expanded from 35 percent to 64 percent of the countrys total area, while its population doubled and its economy grew 300-fold. Those who say a country cant grow its economy and restore its forests at the same time havent been to South Korea.

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