How Restoring Forests Benefits People, Nature, and the Climate All at Once

According to new research from a team from the universities of Exeter and Oxford and funded by the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, restoring forests “can benefit humans, boost biodiversity and help tackle climate change simultaneously.”

The paper, "Optimizing Restoration: holistic spatial planning to deliver Nature's Contributions to People with minimal tradeoffs and maximal equity,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When we think about restoring forests, it's often viewed through the lens of "trade-offs." This means we typically focus on one specific goal, like capturing carbon, promoting biodiversity, or supporting local livelihoods. However, the study suggests that when restoration plans are designed with just one goal in mind, they often fall short in delivering on the others.

The study notes that "integrated" restoration plans, which consider all three of these goals, can deliver over 80% of the benefits across all these areas simultaneously. It also found that socioeconomically disadvantaged groups stand to gain the most from this holistic approach.

A framework called Nature's Contribution to People (NCP), which emphasizes a comprehensive approach to how restoration benefits humanity, was employed by these researchers, who also considered equity to round out their analysis. The researchers used this framework to assess large regions in India, focusing on the advantages of letting native forests regenerate naturally in areas that are currently not forested.

To do this, they used an optimization algorithm to map out 3.88 million hectares of potential forest restoration areas, while deliberately avoiding regions like grasslands and agricultural land. Results were impressive, showing that integrated forest restoration plans, which target multiple goals, “deliver on average 83.3% of climate change mitigation NCP, 89.9% of biodiversity value NCP and 93.9% of societal NCP delivered by single-objective plans.”

Additionally, the findings show that 38-41% of those benefiting from these integrated plans are from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, which is a higher percentage than their overall representation in India’s population.