It’s very clear that two things will be fundamental to averting the climate and biodiversity crises. First, we need to stop the destruction and degradation of intact forest landscapes, those last few areas on our planet that can be considered the “best of the last” for wild nature. Second, we need to rapidly get started on the largescale restoration of some of our much more heavily degraded lands.
The question is, how much are these two objectives in conflict?
First of all, which one is more important?
I’ll start this blog post by stating my biases outright. I’m an enormous fan of forest restoration, whether on farmlands or in existing forests. I don’t think there’s anything more inspirational than watching forests regrow and hearing the stories of people who helped this happen.
That said, I think it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that protecting and preventing degradation of older forests is a more important task than growing new ones. And there a number of reasons for this.
- Although well-executed restoration can deliver vast wildlife boons, and plenty of other benefits besides, this takes time. Indeed the full return of old-growth assemblages can take many decades, or even centuries.
- This recovery is in any case fairly uncertain. Multiple factors can act to prevent what we might consider “successful restoration outcomes”. These range from the re-clearing of regrowing forests (the fate of most regenerating forests), to poor recovery of higher-carbon storing trees (because of a dearth of seed-dispersing animals), to the long-term stifling of forest regrowth by vines, fires or invasive grasses.
- We tend to do a poor job as scientists of relaying just how bad the degradation (let alone the deforestation!) of old-growth forests actually is. This is because we typically only consider the effects of a single threat in isolation, or else we only look at the direct aftermath of, say, chainsawing down a tree, or building a road through a forest, without considering the slower burning consequences. But a full and proper stocktaking of the entire impacts of disturbing old-growth forests reveals a cost orders of magnitude higher than we might first assume. It turns out that when it comes to forests, the first cut really does go the deepest, and there are disproportionate downsides to disturbing intact areas.**
For me, these three points hammer home something important that is too often overlooked amidst all the hype around restoration. At least over politically salient timescales, old-growth forests beat secondary ones, hands down. And given the speed at which we need to act to prevent cascading species extinctions, it makes sense to ensure we’ve locked-in the easier victory of protecting and defending our existing old-growth forests before moving on to the more difficult task of restoring new ones. Put simply, we need to stop putting holes in the bucket before we get started on refilling it with water.
So in a bit of a departure from my usual swooning over the potential benefits of restoration, I thought I would crystallize four examples of how, in certain instances, restoration could actually backfire on our older forests. My aim is absolutely not to poo-poo the need for restoration; it’s clearly essential. Rather, it’s to point out how incautious restoration approaches may endanger our planet’s last bastions of diversity.
Direct land competition
Largescale reforestation efforts on farmlands inevitably mean that croplands or pastures get taken out of production. The risks of this are quite obvious. If we don’t have clear approaches to improve yields on remaining farms, and strong benefit-sharing mechanisms, then farmers might just end up razing older forests to make way for new land.
Take China’s colossal Grain-For-Green tree planting programme, history’s largest ever attempt to increase tree cover. In Southwetern China, millions of trees were planted on cropland, mostly to make way for mono-culture plantations. This saw a 24% drop in cropland. Yet during that same period, native forests suffered a 7% reduction (1). So, instead of truly recovering forest, the region’s facsimile of increased forest cover actually displaced native forests, including those that could have naturally regenerated on land freed up from agriculture. A similar story comes from Chile, where perverse economic subsidies in forestry have watched a boom in tree plantations, as natural forests dwindle (2).
How much should tree plantations count towards global reforestation commitments?
Dry, and full of aliens
Such enormous monocultures have spillover effects that could also harm intact forests. These include the spread of non-native species into natural environments and changes in water availability. I’m not a water cycle guru, but I think it’s likely that since large restoration plantations can dry up rivers and appropriate huge portions of annual rainfall (3) this could make nearby, older forests more vulnerable to droughts?
Resource allocation
Then there’s just a question of resource allocation.
China has spent an estimated $66 billion on its Grain For Green tree-planting programme to date. That’s crazy money. Think of what might have been achieved if just a quarter of that was directed towards naturally regenerating native forests and protecting what’s left of its ancient forests. Not to mention investing heavily in limiting the impacts of its infrastructural Belt and Roads Initiative, which overlaps with over 150,000 km2 of critcal habitat worldwide, and is mostly plowing ahead without any biodiversity safeguards (4).
A great distraction
Finally, and related to the last threat, is the very real danger of stolen thunder.
The Bonn Challenge. The UN decade on ecosystem restoration. A trillion trees. AFR100. The New York Declaration. The world’s governments are slowly being whipped into a restoration bonanza, and it’s terrific. But we need to be careful that efforts to protect forests and limit degradation aren’t swept away by this restoration sandstorm. Can you, from the top of your head, name a single campaign or “challenge” focused entirely on preserving our intact forests? Chances are you can’t–and that’s a problem.
It’s a problem encapsulated by the response of G7 countries in the aftermath of the headline-grabbing 2019 fires in the Amazon (5). Rather than facing up to the important issues of protecting indigenous people, enforcing laws, and providing landowners with incentives to conserve existing forests, many nations instead were quick to offer to bankroll restoration efforts in burnt areas.
This points towards an unfortunate brand of quick-fixery that rears its ugly head in many development offsetting programmes. Often, its easier to rally behind wiping up a mess than to invest in the things that would stop it happening again.
So there you have it, a few ways badly done restoration could backfire on our wild places.
Clearly there is room (not to mention a dire need) for both largescale restoration efforts AND protection. It’s not a zero-sum game, and the one is not always pit against the other. Indeed, there are occasions where investments in restoration on farmlands can help in the protection or even persistence of old-growth forests.
For instance, where restoration efforts increase connectivity between older forests fragments, buffer older forests from edge effects and exploitation, and increase their resilence in the face of climate change, this is clearly a win for both older forests, and new ones.
However, it’s equally important to note that there really can be tradeoffs and downsides to restoration. Restoration efforts really can occur to the detriment of what should ultimately be our first, second and third objectives; protecting our old-growth forests from degradation and destruction.
It’s critical we don’t lose sight of this bigger picture as restoration becomes more and more of a hot button topic in the years ahead.
**For example, upon considering the hidden emissions associated with logging, hunting and edge-effects, together with a measure of just how much carbon would have been sucked up over thirty years in the absence of human disturbance (“foregone carbon sequestration”), scientists recently demonstrated that we’ve been underestimating the carbon costs of disturbing intact forests by 626%!
RELATED ARTICLES:
