Rehabilitation and Restoration Of Degraded Forests (PDF) - IUCN

REHABILITATION AND RESTORATION OF DEGRADED FORESTS
These biophysical changes have both social and economic impacts,
with the most immediate effects being felt by communities that
depend on forests for part or all of their livelihood. Forest resources
provide food, medicines and firewood, resources that now have to be
obtained from more distant forests. And as forest areas are reduced
pressure on the remaining forests increases even more.
1.1 Responses
There have been various responses to these losses in forest cover. In
some relatively small areas attempts have been made to re-establish the
original forest communities. More commonly, reforestation has been
carried out using large- or small-scale plantation monocultures. Most
of these plantations consist of exotic species and most involve a
remarkably small number of species. For example, a limited number of
species from just four genera (Pinus, Eucalyptus, Acacia and Tectona)
account for the majority of tropical plantations. Plantations commonly
produce just industrial timber or firewood, although some have been
specifically established for other purposes such as desertification
control, salinity prevention or slope protection. Forest regrowth occurs
in some degraded landscapes but there have been only limited attempts
to manage these naturally regenerating forests, at least in the tropics.
These responses to deforestation and to the rapid increase in the area
of degraded lands are usually inadequate. Reforestation has been
carried out at a fraction of the deforestation rate and the new forests
provide only some of the goods and services provided by the original
forests. Most new forests, for example, are established simply to
provide industrial timber; they benefit governments or large corporations
rather than local communities. Many reforestation schemes do
offer some functional benefits, such as watershed protection, but their
simple composition and structure mean that they rarely contribute
significantly to biodiversity conservation. Further, new forests are not
always located in places with the largest areas of degraded land.
The overall effect of this process of forest degradation is a reduction in
human well-being and a loss of biodiversity and ecological goods and
services. The fragile state of the world’s forests (particularly tropical
forests) is widely acknowledged and has been the subject of debate for
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