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Monitoring is the only way to effectively assess the performance of global restoration initiatives, but is not yet receiving the attention it deserves, says Manuel Guariguata, CIFOR’s Team Leader on Forest Management and Restoration.
Guariguata spoke about the importance of combining top-down and bottom-approaches to monitoring at the 13th Conference of Parties to the CBD (CBD COP13), held from 4-17 December 2016 in Cancun, Mexico.
Find out more about CIFOR’s involvement in CBD COP13 here.
New research presented at the conference also highlighted the potential for natural regeneration to contribute to global restoration goals, like the Bonn Challenge and the 20×20 Initiative.
This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.
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Transcript:
00:11
No it has not been given enough attention, and it is sad because that’s the only way
00:16
you can gauge if your restoration activity is achieving its original objectives or not,
00:23
and if not, why?
00:25
So the activities of monitoring are and need to be an integral part of any national or
00:32
global restoration plan.
00:34
So far there have been conversations on how we could measure whether these global commitments
00:41
will be achieved, but it stays there pretty much, and that’s a very top-down approach,
00:49
which has its values.
00:50
In other words, you can quantify forest cover gains from space, but you also need to quantify
00:57
and gauge whether the restoration activity is succeeding at the ground level, because
01:03
restoration starts on the ground.
01:05
So we need both a bottom-up and a top-down approach to really satisfy both dimensions
01:13
and generate reliable data that tells at the end, by 2020 or 2045, whether these ambitious
01:23
commitments were achieved or not.
01:37
To meet these targets, you need to consider a lot of different variables.
01:41
Not only the state of degradation, and not only whether a given vegetation type or ecosystem
01:47
type is more threatened than others.
01:50
You need to consider also tenure rights, socioeconomic data, and above all you need to have clarity
01:58
on what your restoration objectives are.
02:00
Not necessarily meaning increasing forest cover, but probably enhancing the supply of
02:07
a given ecosystem service, like watershed protection for example, or carbon fixation,
02:13
or biodiversity objectives.
02:14
And when you don’t have that clarity in these so-called national restoration plans
02:21
or restoration maps, you tend to focus only on the vegetation part.
02:29
We think that not enough attention is being given to national restoration plans in the
02:37
context of how to allow nature to take its course.
02:42
Most of the discourse is based on tree planting, which of course has, you know, a very valid
02:46
reason.
02:47
It has a productive objective as well as protective, but there are many other post-effective approaches,
02:54
and one of them is allowing forest succession to proceed in areas where the substrate and
03:00
other ecological conditions aren’t good enough that the process can really evolve
03:04
towards a mature ecosystem in 20, 30, 40 years.
03:09
So on the one hand it can be very cost-effective because you don’t need to invest in tree
03:13
planting or nurseries, but on the other hand you need to be really careful and decide how
03:18
exactly and where the chances of success are the best.
03:23
So to me the best strategy is to combine both so-called active approaches to restoration
03:29
and passive approaches to restoration, which is in essence allowing forest succession to
03:34
proceed without any human intervention or else with very little human intervention.
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Previously published on forestsnews.cifor.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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