إصلاح الغابات
Basic knowledge
Forest restoration has received a great deal of attention from scientists and policymakers for its potential contribution to climate change mitigation (Shukla et al., 2019). Natural climate solutions may be able to provide more than a third of the carbon capture from the atmosphere needed in order to limit the risks of climate change above 1.5 ºC (Griscom et al., 2017). Forests have the largest potential of these natural climate solutions. Forest restoration also has important links with biodiversity, as restoration of stable forests that provide multiple ecosystem services requires a functional understanding of the biodiversity that underpins ecosystem functioning (Aerts and Honnay, 2011). Forest restoration is thus included along with conservation in the decisions and targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and the Bonn Challenge. Forest restoration follows processes of forest degradation and deforestation, which are dealt with in separate modules in the Sustainable Forest Management Toolbox.
Recently the concept of Forest and Landscape Restoration has become prominent. This refers to the restoration not only of the forest cover at a particular site, but views the site in the context of the landscape as a whole; it includes all land uses and the people in it. Forest and Landscape Restoration is covered in a separate module: the Forest and Landscape Restoration Module deals with the restoration of many sites within the context of a multiple-use landscape.
This module therefore deals with forest and its restoration at the site level. However, it is very important that even when dealing with forest restoration at a single site that this site be considered in its environmental and social context. Guiding principles are presented in more depth, and the reader is directed to specific reference works in the tools section of this module. Cases are presented across ecological zones to illustrate concepts of site-based restoration.
الوحدات ذات الصلة
- الآفات الحرجية
- تخطيط استخدام الأراضي
- إدارة الغابات المزروعة
- نُهج وأدوات تشاركية لتحقيق الإدارة المستدامة للغابات
- المناطق المحمية
- الزراعة الحرجية في الغابات الطبيعية
- إدارة حرائق النبات
- إدارة الحياة البرية
تساهم استعادة الغابات في تحقيق أهداف التنمية المستدامة:
Forest restoration encompasses a large variety of staring points and objectives. It is thought of as reversing forest degradation or loss of productivity of ecosystem goods and services such as food, wood, biodiversity, and water. As a consequence of human activity and other natural processes, these types of needs for restoration are found all over the world’s forests, from drylands to tropical rainforests, from high latitudes and altitudes, and from poor to rich regions. By some estimates, the annual economic losses due to deforestation and land degradation were EUR 1.5–3.4 trillion in 2008, equalling 3.3–7.5 per cent of the global GDP at that time (ELD Secretariat, 2015).
Forest restoration includes:
- rehabilitation, meaning the restoration of desired species, structures or processes to an existing ecosystem;
- reconstruction, meaning restoration of native plants on land which is in another use;
- reclamation, meaning restoration of severely degraded land devoid of vegetation;
- most radically replacement, in which species or provinces maladapted for a given location and unable to migrate are replaced with introduced species as climates change rapidly.
(Stanturf, Palik and Dumroese, 2014)
Forest restoration can be understood in relation to the forest transition curve shown in Figure 1. Rehabilitation would normally be carried out in order to restore the productivity of a forest in the degraded stage whilst reconstruction or reclamation would be carried out in forests that were so degraded as to have ceased functioning as effective forests. In many parts of the world, land abandoned from agricultural purposes will regenerate naturally to form secondary forests that are in their nature and composition different from the forests that preceded them. Active management can accelerate this process or change the trajectory of the succession so that the structure or composition better achieves certain management objectives. Disasters, including fires and high winds, may cause the loss of forest cover over large areas, and this may require restoration in order to accelerate natural regeneration processes and a return to a more productive condition.
In more depth
Guiding principles for successful, ecologically sound, socially acceptable and economically viable forest restoration initiatives outlined in Basic Knowledge are described in more detail in this section. Readers may refer to the Tools and Further learning sections for more comprehensive coverage of the topic.