Rehabilitation and Restoration Of Degraded Forests (PDF) - IUCN

REHABILITATION AND RESTORATION OF DEGRADED FORESTS
biodiversity gains might run the risk of being unsustainable over the
longer term for purely social reasons. For example, a restoration project
in a heavily populated area that involved planting trees for biodiversity
purposes, but which contributed no other short-term benefits to poor
farmers, might run the risk of being burned or grazed. Similarly,
natural regrowth forest managed solely to foster biodiversity might be
“accidentally” cleared for agriculture. A better option might be to
encourage some of the more commercially attractive species in the
regrowth (e.g. by some judicious thinning) so they could be harvested
at a later date.
At Position 4 human well-being has improved but environmental
conditions have not changed. In fact, they may have even declined
further. In this case the gains may be short-term and potentially
unsustainable for ecological rather than social reasons. This might be
true where most of the original landscape is cleared and used, say, for
intensive agriculture.
There are, of course, examples where intensive agriculture is relatively
successful. But there are increasing numbers of examples in highly
simplified landscapes where it is not. Just how much complexity or
biological diversity is needed in such landscapes is currently the subject
of intensive research (e.g. Hobbs and Morton 1999, Lefroy et al. 1999,
Kaiser 2000).
The two conceptual models (Figures 2b and 3) suggest that several
definitions are needed to distinguish between the various objectives a
land manager might wish to consider. These now include reclamation,
rehabilitation, ecological restoration and a collective term, forest
landscape restoration (Box 3).
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