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This book presents the results of an international research project, which was designed explicitly to examine application of the FLR approach to dryland forest ecosystems in Latin America. In order for FLR to be transferred into mainstream practice that is adopted and promoted by governments and the private sector, as well as by local communities, information is needed on how the principles of FLR can be implemented in practice, in a cost-effective manner. It is this information need that the project was designed to address.

To introduce the concept of FLR in Ghana, the Government of Ghana supported the establishment of a National Working Group on Forest Landscape in 2004 to develop a National Plan of Action on FLR and encourage innovative restoration efforts. In addition, a National workshop on ITTO guidelines for the restoration, management and rehabilitation of degraded and secondary tropical forest was held in Ghana in 2006.

Land Use Planning for Low Emission Development Strategy (LUWES) is a platform for developing a multiple stakeholder decision-making process to establish land use plans for sustainable development, which can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from land-based activity while simultaneously maintaining economic growth. It can simulate emissions reduction scenarios within specific zones of a landscape, or across an entire landscape, in order to produce ex ante emissions reduction and opportunity cost forecasts. The strategy is currently being implemented in all provinces in Indonesia, and also being piloted in other countries –Vietnam, Cameroon and Peru where training and initial studies for implementation and scale up are being conducted.

Capacity development (CapDev) has been an integral part of the World Agroforestry Centre’s (ICRAF) overall program to both facilitate the use and impact of its research as well as to enhance the relevance of its research and development for partners’ needs. Capacitating is one of four value propositions ICRAF offers to its clients in its new strategy to achieve the System Level Outcomes (SLO) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

From November 19 to 21, 2014, some of the world’s most noted specialists on forest landscape restoration gathered in Rio de Janeiro to assess Natural Regeneration as a cost-effective strategy to achieve large-scale restoration throughout the world. Following are some of the key insights and messages from the meeting. Biodiversity loss, increasing soil degradation (as much as 1/3 of the world’s land highly or moderately degraded), and a changing climate create an urgent need for large-scale landscape restoration initiatives. This need has been quantified in a series of global meetings, the latest of which (in 2014) resulted in the New York Declaration, calling for 350 Million hectares, or 2.5% of the world’s land area, to be under restoration by 2030. The enormous size of the restoration challenge could require a cost of 1.75 trillion dollars over 15 years (close to 120 billion dollars annually) if only Restoration Planting is used as a restoration approach. Thus, it is crucial to employ lowcost approaches. Also, developing business models that are profitable for farmers and other landholders and at the same time restore the functionality and productivity of degraded lands is crucial to the success of restoration efforts, as those will inevitably fail without the support of key stakeholders. Natural regeneration is one such approach: In its most basic form, it consists of letting remaining portions of the original ecosystem re-colonize a degraded area. A 5-fold cost reduction can be achieved when compared to Restoration Planting; additionally, species colonize from the surrounding area and are adapted to local conditions and to other species (local genotypes). Different degrees of human intervention may also be employed, either to enable regeneration in landscapes whose resilience is too low to recover on their own (assisted Natural Regeneration), or in order to reap the benefits of Natural Regeneration for local farmers (farmer-managed Natural Regeneration).