Local Communities Must be Prioritized for Successful Restoration Projects: Study

 

                       

By Hamza Badamasi

Previous studies in ecosystem restoration that support top-down policy approaches to restore land as a component of global land-conservation efforts run the risk of subverting people's livelihoods, food security, and eviction of people from their lands, leading to human rights abuses and eroding long-term conservation benefits, a new study reveals.

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Ecosystem restoration is recognized as a crucial effort in preserving biodiversity and stabilizing our planet. The United Nations has designated the 2020s as the decade of ecosystem restoration, urging countries worldwide to devote resources to healing the planet. Researchers have proposed a number of global priority maps in order to determine where restoration funding should be directed. For example, Dr. Bernardo B.N. Strassburg and colleagues published a notable and influential research paper in 2020 that uses spatial mapping to identify global priority hotspots for ecosystem restoration. 

A recent paper published in the Nature journal by a group of researchers argued that these top-down policy approaches to restoring land using spatial maps have several flaws, and the authors noted that these studies rarely include information about who is affected by restoration.

The researchers discovered three significant flaws in the 2020 paper, which are as follows: i. The names of the people who live in the lands designated as restoration priorities are not shown on the maps. ii. Despite the fact that their maps clearly show that these costs will disproportionately affect underdeveloped rural areas in the tropics, they fail to consider who will be responsible for paying for restoration. iii. The paper placed scientists as decision makers rather than the people who will be affected by the project.

According to co-author of the study and Political Science Professor Eric Coleman at Florida State University, restoration efforts that don't take into account local residents' rights and current land uses will fail.

Coleman cited initiatives in the Yucatan Peninsula, where the Mexican government gave landowners money in exchange for planting new trees.

There has been a significant international push to plant trees as a key strategy for combating climate change over the past five to ten years, he claimed. However, there is evidence that farmers in Mexico destroyed healthy forests in order to receive payment to replant trees in the same locations.

Similar examples of top-down restoration projects going wrong, according to Coleman, have occurred all over the world, including in India, where his research indicates that five decades of tree planting haven't increased forest cover and have actually decreased the benefits that forests provide to local communities.

"Top-down restoration policies run the risk of compromising long-term conservation benefits and undermining local livelihoods, food security, and eviction from their lands." He continued.

Coleman highlights one significant issue with international policy initiatives: the majority of the lands prioritised for restoration are located in the tropics. The interests of the poor and the environment face greater difficulties in these nations, which frequently have weak democracies.

Likewise, Dr. Forrest Fleischman, corresponding author of this study and an associate professor of environmental policy at the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources. pointed out that "People who will be directly impacted by restoration must play a significant role in deciding how restoration will be carried out. These individuals possess critical local ecological knowledge and are aware of their own financial requirements, allowing them to design effective restoration strategies and prevent widespread violations of human rights."

"Biologists and social scientists need to work collaboratively to resolve disciplinary limitations," said Joseph Veldman, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University's Department of Ecology & Conservation Biology. People are a crucial component of the equation for all types of conservation, and ecologists in specific need to be aware of this. However, not all ecologists share these beliefs, which are often based on cultural ideals created in Europe and North America. For a restoration project to be successful, it is crucial to engage with the diverse perspectives of the many residents and workers in the priority areas.

Despite the fact that the goal of ecosystem restoration is to stop the degradation of the planet's landscapes and waterbodies, the activity risks eradicating the lives of millions of the world's poorest people if their farmlands and pastures are converted to natural ecosystems, reducing global agricultural production. This is particularly true if the movement excludes those who will be most affected.

Photo credit: Simeon Max