are set out below. Although characterized as steps, in practice the approach involves an ongoing process of adaptive management.

1.      Develop a landscape view of the problem and the scope for forest restoration

This step involves gathering and sharing relevant biophysical and socioeconomic data about the landscape and the ways in which it is being used. This might include information on existing land uses, the natural vegetation cover (including sites with high biodiversity value), and deforested areas with opportunities for natural tree regrowth and reforestation through planting. Other important information might relate to land ownership (including where there are ownership disputes), areas where agriculture is marginal or degradation severe, and the success or otherwise of previous reforestation, natural regeneration, agroforestry and conservation agriculture measures. Recent trends in land and crop prices might be helpful, for example, in identifying locations where the opportunity costs of reforestation are low or decreasing.

2.     Group engagement to identify possibilities

This step involves bringing stakeholders together to identify how and where forest restoration might be worthwhile and to develop landscape restoration scenarios. Stakeholders may include landholders and local communities, downstream water users, industries dependent on forest resources, the residents of nearby towns, municipal, subnational and national governments, and civil-society organizations. These various stakeholders should be brought together to share background information and explore ways in which FLR might be undertaken in different parts of the landscape and the partnerships and trade-offs this might necessitate. Representatives of governments and non-governmental organizations might be able to advise on methodologies, potential markets for forest goods and environmental services, and sources of financial assistance. Landholders might be best-placed to identify locations where the opportunity costs of restoration would be lowest and to indicate the need for compensatory payments.

3.     Decision-making and priority-setting

There is likely to be a wide range of views among stakeholders on restoration options, the relative importance of the various economic, social and environmental factors at play, and the priorities for FLR action. Accommodating and reconciling such differences may require the formation of new – or the modification of existing – planning and management institutions and a potentially lengthy participatory decision-making process.

4.     Implementation

Implementation can commence once agreement has been reached on future restoration options. It may occur over several years, and it may be modified over time in light of experience and the monitoring of ecological, social and economic outcomes.

5.     Monitoring and adaptive management

Given the dynamic nature of landscapes and their interconnected ecosystems, FLR needs to be flexible and informed by experience and information. Unexpected outcomes (e.g. difficulties in matching species with sites, nutritional deficiencies, and the occurrence of pests, diseases or wildfires) need to be detected and the approach duly modified. There may also be changes in attitudes among stakeholders, with some becoming more enthusiastic for FLR and others less so. Changes may occur in economic and political circumstances that affect the FLR process.

The monitoring programme should be capable of identifying such challenges and allowing the development of responses. Monitoring can be expensive, and the programme needs to be designed carefully. An overly ambitious monitoring programme may be hard to sustain, while a superficial programme may provide insufficient information. The best form of monitoring is one that generates answers to specific questions. Table 1 provides examples of questions that a monitoring programme might seek to answer; it is not intended to be definitive, and the nature of any monitoring programme should reflect local objectives and circumstances.

Many tools exist for assessing the status of landscape degradation, identifying restoration opportunities, and monitoring the progress of FLR (see Tools).

How to identify restoration opportunities and priorities

Most agricultural landscapes contain mosaics of productive and less-productive lands, and some of the latter may be marginal for agriculture. But which of these less-productive or marginal lands should be targeted for restoration, and how can they be prioritized? Should priority be given to an eroding hill slope, or to a shrinking wildlife habitat? Such decisions will depend partly on the willingness of landholders to undertake restoration on their lands, and priority-setting will also need to take into account factors such as the costs and benefits of restoration in particular locations, equity, and practical considerations. The best way of resolving complex questions on FLR is to involve all relevant stakeholders in the decision-making process.

What are the enabling conditions for restoration?

FLR is most feasible when it benefits landholders, but disincentives often exist that limit these benefits and therefore the attractiveness of restoration. Disincentives may include a lack of land tenure, agricultural subsidies favouring current agricultural practices, limitations on the harvesting and sale of forest products, and excessive taxes and fees on the transportation of forest products to market. A lack of markets for environmental services may also be a disincentive. The best way of encouraging landholders to participate in FLR is to remove disincentives, thereby enabling growers to benefit directly and increasing the recognition of tree-growing (and other FLR practices) as a legitimate and valuable land use.

Positive incentives may sometimes be needed to induce change. These might include providing information and knowledge on silviculture and market opportunities (e.g. for wood and non-wood forest products and environmental services), and assistance in accessing markets. In some cases it may be necessary to provide material incentives, such as free seedlings or cash grants, to encourage the uptake of FLR practices and to assist landholders until their FLR efforts begin to provide market benefits.

What institutional settings and governance issues can facilitate FLR?

FLR differs from many previous large-scale reforestation programmes because it necessarily involves a variety of stakeholders, who may have widely varying objectives (and hence differing levels of interest in FLR). Institutions may need to operate at several scales and cross-sectorally to reconcile the views and aspirations of stakeholders and to ensure that FLR efforts are complementary to other national objectives.

A national-level multistakeholder platform or other institutional structure may be needed, perhaps embedded in a forestry or environmental agency. This body should include representatives of sectors such as agriculture, water resources, natural resource conservation, finance and forestry, as well as representatives of relevant national community organizations and the private sector. Its purpose would be to ensure that FLR actions complement and enhance other national objectives, such as food and water security, poverty reduction, conservation, and industrial development. The platform may also serve a function as a means of channelling funding to field practitioners. In Guatemala, for example, an FLR roundtable facilitated an inclusive participatory process to develop a national FLR strategy and is now helping the implementation of the strategy.

Complementary local planning institutions are also likely to be needed, involving, for example, government agencies and producer, community and conservation organizations. Mechanisms linking national and local bodies should be put in place to ensure complementarity between them and that national objectives are addressed and to provide feedback for informing national policies. Capacity building may be required to enable community groups to fully participate in these institutions.

Institutions can be captured by bureaucratic or political elites, and a key task, therefore, is to ensure that members of these bodies are properly representative of all stakeholders and have an effective voice. Measures should be adopted for resolving conflicts within and between the various institutions, ensuring that information is shared between institutions operating at the national, subnational and local levels, and making the institutions accountable to their constituencies for their decisions and actions. 

There are two technologies to consider. The first concerns the type of restoration needed to produce both forest products and environmental services. The second relates to the methods by which stakeholders are made aware of the opportunities provided by FLR and the constraints to implementing it in various parts of a landscape.

There are five basic approaches for restoring forest cover (see also Figure 1):

1. Restore existing degraded forests – by minimizing disturbances such as unregulated logging, wildfires and grazing and accelerating recovery by enrichment planting or liberation felling.
2. Facilitate natural regeneration on deforested former agricultural land – by, for example, excluding disturbances such as wildfire and grazing, protecting regrowth arising from soil seed pools and old stumps, and enriching new forests with seedlings of preferred species.
3. Monoculture tree plantations –commonly involving fast-growing and commercially attractive species and usually the most easily managed of the various restoration alternatives. Monoculture tree plantations are ordinarily harvested and replanted at regular intervals; they may provide certain environmental services (e.g. carbon storage) but are less capable of supplying others (e.g. wildlife habitat). They can be a financially remunerative option for landholders, especially those with access to industrial markets for forest products (e.g. sawmills or pulpmills).
4. Multi-species plantings – involving the re-establishment of original species along with certain exotic species (a process sometimes referred to as rehabilitation). This may be the only effective option when sites are so heavily degraded that the original species cannot be re-established on their own or where ecological restoration is precluded for financial reasons. This approach can restore many ecological functions, and it can be attractive to landholders interested in developing agroforestry systems or growing multi-species timber plantations in order to diversify the range of goods and environmental services they produce and to widen market opportunities and thereby reduce economic risk.
5. Ecological restoration – in which all original species (trees and other plants) are re-established with the ultimate intention of restoring the original ecosystem. This option usually requires areas of existing natural forest in the landscape to act as an ecological reference point and to provide a source of seeds and wildlife. This is often the preferred option in those parts of a landscape where biodiversity conservation is a main objective.

Table 2 presents a summary of the capacity of each of these options to supply goods and environmental services at sites with and without existing forest cover, and further details are available in the Forest Restoration and Rehabilitation module.

Various forms of agroforestry can be important parts of FLR programmes (see the Agroforestry module). Agroforestry commonly involves relatively low tree densities and may not always contribute significantly to restoring forest cover. Some agroforestry practices, however, such as those involving the enrichment of fallow areas and other forms of natural forest regeneration, are very similar to forest restoration.

All the approaches described above might be used in the same landscape mosaic. Each requires detailed knowledge of species and their site requirements, with ecological restoration likely to be the most expensive approach because it often necessitates considerable management inputs (although it can sometimes be achieved relatively cheaply if natural forest regrowth is still possible). Scientific research and on-farm experimentation by individual landholders can both be important in developing appropriate technologies. 

* Also depends on age and landscape context (especially distance to seed sources in natural forests).

FLR requires effective approaches for informing and involving stakeholders, for example in decisions on which areas of land are to be restored and how it might be done. Some stakeholders may seek quantitative analyses of FLR options, while others may favour more visually oriented tools and practical examples. The former might be produced using computer models and databases of, for example, topography, soils, vegetation, biodiversity and cadastral information. Some models also use economic data such as crop and land prices to generate estimates of costs and benefits (although it can be difficult to quantify the price of environmental services). To date, few such models have been used directly to generate land-use plans at the landscape scale, and their chief value may lie in helping decision-makers explore the implications of competing FLR scenarios.

When large databases are unavailable, such as in many developing countries, visual tools or simple models may be more helpful in facilitating discussions on land-use options. These might include the following:

• simple maps showing the spatial context in which restoration might be done;
• “rich maps”, which are maps drawn by stakeholders based on local knowledge that show areas of local importance and identify restoration options;
• aerial photographs or satellite imagery showing present land-use patterns;
• three-dimensional models (e.g. made of clay) of the landscape, with existing land uses painted onto the surface;
• simple “throw-away” simulation models created for specific situations or landscapes with the assistance of local stakeholders. These can identify entry or leverage points and can be used to examine the implications of different scenarios; and
• demonstration areas where restoration alternatives are developed at an operational scale. These might be located at a range of sites differing, for example, in soil fertility, altitude or degree of degradation.

(See also the Participatory Approaches and Tools in Forestry module).

In most landscapes, patterns of land ownership mean that restoration can only be undertaken with the involvement of the private sector. Some landowners may be willing to participate in FLR because they believe they (and their families) will benefit directly from the sale of forest products or environmental services. Alternatively, landowners may be willing to participate because of the indirect benefits they will receive; for example, landscape restoration may help protect commercial agricultural crops from erosion and thereby make production more sustainable. Large corporate landowners may find FLR attractive because natural regrowth or areas of planted forests prevent erosion on steeper lands or act as firebreaks. Involvement in FLR shows a willingness to help conserve biodiversity and improve local livelihoods, thereby providing corporations with reputational benefits. But the extent of private-sector involvement will depend on the policy and institutional framework established by governments, including the legal obligations of landowners. Private-sector involvement is often predicated on research previously undertaken by government-funded research that reduces silvicultural and economic risks, thereby making investment more attractive to the private sector.

Traditional industrial reforestation often involves single sources of finance (e.g. government or corporate), but FLR is likely to involve a variety of funding sources, some of which are associated with markets (aimed at creating new private assets) and others deriving from non-market sources (to create publicly valued goods or services). Government funding is often crucial for initiating FLR projects, but markets can provide powerful incentives for landholders to undertake restoration.

Timber is the main product that has encouraged reforestation in the past, but there is growing interest in markets for environmental services (often referred to as “payments for environmental services” schemes or “rewards for environmental services”). Establishing and supplying such markets is challenging because of the complexities of coordinating restoration among landholders and, in some cases, the reluctance of the users of environmental services to pay for them.

Markets alone may be insufficient to fund FLR, and directed financial subsidies or incentives may be necessary to overcome the opportunity costs. Some such subsidies may derive from government, but international development assistance may also have a role to play, channelled through governments or non-governmental organizations.

Environmental funds (such as national forest funds or the Green Climate Fund) can be key sources of financing for FLR. They are diverse, with differing geographical scopes and investment targets, and their capital may derive from a wide range of sources – private, public, national or international, and any combination of these. Many environmental funds are short-term, however, compared with the long time horizons usually involved in FLR.

Impact funds (funds that seek outcomes for the financial, environmental and social triple bottom line) are becoming important investors in FLR. Examples include the EcoBusiness Fund, the Moringa Partnership, the Althelia Climate Fund, and Permian Global; see here for a detailed overview of existing impact funds.

Innovative financing tools such as crowd-funding platforms may be an additional means of obtaining funding for FLR. Examples of crowd-funding platforms for FLR include Stand for Trees and Mirlo Positive Nature.

Building “marketplaces” to enable the fruitful meeting of investors and project developers and promoters can be important in promoting sustainable financing for FLR.

Public policymakers from developed and developing countries at all levels (i.e. national, subnational and local) have the opportunity to play leadership roles as FLR financing champions. Even though they do not control private capital, they can support resource mobilization by:

• integrating FLR into government budgets and public investment funds, and ensuring that these financing instruments do not cause negative impacts in landscapes;
• mobilizing official development assistance (ODA) funds for FLR and adapting the wide range of ODA instruments to FLR;
• promoting FLR as a solution for climate-change mitigation and adaptation and targeting climate finance windows. Policy advocacy in the development of the Adaptation Fund and the Green Climate Fund (among others) may help increase funding for FLR;
• developing monitoring systems for FLR expenditure and data collection mechanisms on the costs and benefits of FLR investments;
• designing, adapting and implementing adequate national and local financing mechanisms for FLR, such as national forest funds. Local funds can drive direct FLR implementation at the subnational level;
• using such financing mechanisms to implement public incentives schemes, such as payments for environmental services. A long-term self-sustaining financing strategy may involve coupling public incentives schemes with investment in sustainable value chains;
• increasing engagement in public–private partnerships, especially with pioneer private impact funds for FLR and other innovative initiatives such as layered funds that can benefit from the support of governments and public institutions. Public funds are particularly relevant for the readiness phase of FLR investments;
• building legal and regulatory frameworks that make landscapes “ready for investments” and attract the right set of investors to FLR interventions;
• establishing risk-mitigation mechanisms as a key factor in engaging FLR investors at scale; and
• promoting partnerships and alliances at the local, subnational and national levels and contributing to international FLR initiatives.

Reforestation of any kind may be a novel land-use option in many agricultural landscapes, especially where landholders have historically been involved in tree-clearing. Extension foresters may be needed to promote the idea and build the capacity of landholders to establish trees and benefit from doing so. But landholders may also need assistance to recognize the roles of other stakeholders and to benefit from participation in local FLR management institutions. At the same time, many government officers and agencies may need training to recognize the role of other stakeholders and to understand that FLR should not be imposed in a top-down process but must be participatory.

Farmers, who usually comprise the majority of landholders and, in developing countries, are mostly smallholders, should be primary targets of sensitization processes. The most effective way to ensure that farmers want to participate in FLR is to integrate messages on improving agricultural productivity with those on sustainable land management.

Two channels are commonly used to address farmers: extension agents and farmer field schools. Ensuring that agricultural extension agents are willing and able to introduce and support FLR technologies, which they may view as outside their domain, is crucial. Farmer field schools are used to train farmers in agricultural practices and have the potential to disseminate FLR technologies.