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Drawing from seven years of progress of project for Guesselbodi and Gorou-Bassounga National Forests in Niger, the authors were able to produce a detailed manual that can be used to establish restoration and management plans for other forests in the region. Descriptions of activities such as resource inventories, landform evaluations, erosion pattern analysis and vegetative mapping, among many others, are given in detail in order to serve as an instructional guide for planners. In the Sahel, drought, over-harvesting, desertification and human-initiated fires undermine forest resource sustainability. Villagers and nomadic herdsmen have extensive knowledge of local conditions and should participate actively in the development of a managed forest. Market analysis and inventories make management goals clear, and monitoring should be incorporated into the plan so that degradation that detracts from the goals can be detected early. These and other activities such as mapping, research, baseline studies, inventories, road planning, site preparation, development of work calendars, control of resource extraction, establishing checks and balances in enforcement, defining clear roles and responsibilities, and maintenance should be emphasized in management plans. Projects such as these should be developed such that they will continue after funding has ended. This will be assured in part if communities are trained to perform management, and if forests can pay their own way by producing sustainable and marketable products. Forest management projects should be treated as a business, with profits reinvested in the management of the forest. Project success also depends on community acceptance of projects, which is more likely if local people are involved in each phase.

This document aim is to provide possible solutions by analyzing the economic effects of the restoration project around the ecological/economic value. In addition, integrated land management is presented through case study based on analysis. The previous results are used in public policies to provide an enabling condition for large scale restoration.

Macro-economic decisions determine the resources allocated at an international and a country-level to natural resource management. Micro-economic theory and tools are then used to ensure that this allocation will materialize into desired economic, environmental and societal outcomes. Restoration projects differ in their costs and benefits. The costs may entail operational costs, and those associated with alternative foregone opportunities. The benefits of restoration may reflect biodiversity outcomes or the provision of ecosystem goods and services, such as the supply of water and carbon sequestration. Restoration also has the potential to ensure supply of timber and non-timber forest products such as food and medicines, with potential significance for subsistence livelihoods. We synthesise approaches to valuing the costs and benefits of restoration projects in order to explore the economic consequences of restoration decisions and to prioritise investments. We finish the chapter by outlining economic incentives and policies that might support the implementation of restoration activities.

The purpose of this guidebook is to serve as guidance for those interested in developing a land-use change and forestry projects and bioenergy projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. It also provides material on the voluntary markets at the end as Annex G. The guidebook has been created by Winrock International and has been modified from the original version produced for and in collaboration with the International Tropical Timber Organization. The main modification is the addition of material on bio-energy projects and an Annex on the voluntary markets.

Forest landscape restoration activities are often misunderstood as involving high upfront costs and low rates of return. To address this gap in knowledge, this report presents a cost-benefit framework for accounting for the ecosystem services and economic impacts of forest landscape restoration activities in a way that allows the results to be structured to inform multiple types of restoration decision-making that can help decision makers understand the trade-offs of different restoration scenarios. The results can be used to set prices for payment for ecosystem services, identify sources of restoration finance, identify low-cost/high-benefit pathways towards carbon sequestration, and identify priority landscapes for restoration based on return-on-investment analysis.