Tropical Reforestation in the Asia-Pacific Region

background

This chapter reviews the meaning and implementation of landscape scale restoration in the Asia-Pacific region.  The authors define landscape as a spatial mosaic with differing land use patterns across a gradient, usually involving natural and human-intervened areas which changes through time.

Conclusions & Takeaways

Forest Landscape Restoration involves strengthening functionality and resilience of the social-ecological systems because it is very resource intensive to restore original forest cover at large scales. Landscape scale restoration assumes that landowners have land tenure so that they would consider restoration as an future investment. Reforestation for economic benefits will involve timber markets and distance to the market (transportation costs). For the planning of restoration activities, modeling software can identify priority areas, but it is difficult to implement due to political realities. The author reviews possible decision making support tools such as visual, community-drawn maps (rich maps), scenario analyses (maps of potential future scenarios), simple models, cost effectiveness analyses.