O Diagnóstico da Restauração foi desenvolvido pelo World Resources Institute (WRI) e pela União Nacional para a Conservação da Natureza (IUCN) como uma ferramenta complementar à Metodologia de Avaliação de Oportunidades de Restauração (ROAM), com o objetivo de apoiar atores locais e tomadores de decisão a determinar o status das condições favoráveis para o estabelecimento de políticas, práticas e medidas para uma restauração de paisagens e florestas bem-sucedida.

Recent developments have seen forest landscape restoration (FLR) become widely recognized as an important means of not only restoring ecological integrity at scale but also generating additional local-to-global benefits. This handbook presents the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM), which provides a flexible and affordable framework for countries to rapidly identify and analyse FLR potential and locate special areas of opportunity at a national or sub-national level. The handbook offers practical advice and options to bear in mind when considering or conducting an FLR assessment using ROAM, as well as real-life examples of the kinds of outputs you can expect, and will enable you to commission or design a tailor-made process to meet your specific needs.

Existing guidelines and best-practices documents do not satisfy, at present, the need for guiding implementation of Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) based on core principles. Given the wide range of FLR practices and the varied spectrum of actors involved, a single working framework is unlikely to be effective, but tailored working frameworks can be co-created based on a common conceptual framework (i.e., a common core set of principles and a generalized set of criteria and indicators). We present background regarding FLR concepts, definitions, and principles, and discuss the challenges that confront effective and long-term implementation of FLR. We enumerate the many benefits that a transformative criteria and indicators framework can bring to actors and different sectors involved in restoration when such framework is anchored in the FLR principles. We justify the need to co-develop and apply specifically tailored working frameworks to help ensure that FLR interventions bring social, economic, and environmental benefits to multiple stakeholders within landscapes and adjust to changing conditions over time. Several examples of working FLR frameworks are presented to illustrate the goals and needs of communities, donors and investors, and government agencies. Transparency, feedback, communication, assessment, and adaptive management are important components of all working frameworks. Finally, we describe existing FLR guidelines and what we can learn from them. Working frameworks can be developed and used by different actors who seek to initiate an FLR process and to align restoration actions at different scales and levels.

A hundred research priorities of critical importance to protected area management were identified by a targeted survey of conservation professionals; half researchers and half practitioners.Respondents were selected to represent a range of disciplines, every continent except Antarctica and roughly equal numbers of men and women.The results analysed thematically and grouped as potential research topics as by both practitioners and researchers.Priority research gaps reveal a high interest to demonstrate the role of protected areas within a broader discussion about sustainable futures and if and how protected areas can address a range of conservation and socio-economic challenges effectively.The paper lists the hundred priorities structured under broad headings of management, ecology, governance and social (including political and economic issues) and helps contribute to setting future research agendas.

As the terrestrial human footprint continues to expand, the amount of native forest that is free from significant damaging human activities is in precipitous decline. There is emerging evidence that the remaining intact forest supports an exceptional confluence of globally significant environmental values relative to degraded forests, including imperilled biodiversity, carbon sequestration and storage, water provision, indigenous culture and the maintenance of human health. Here we argue that maintaining and, where possible, restoring the integrity of dwindling intact forests is an urgent priority for current global efforts to halt the ongoing biodiversity crisis, slow rapid climate change and achieve sustainability goals. Retaining the integrity of intact forest ecosystems should be a central component of proactive global and national environmental strategies, alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and promoting reforestation.

An intact forest landscape (IFL) is a seamless mosaic of forest and naturally treeless ecosystems with no remotely detected signs of human activity and a minimum area of 500 km(2). IFLs are critical for stabilizing terrestrial carbon storage, harboring biodiversity, regulating hydrological regimes, and providing other ecosystem functions. Although the remaining IFLs comprise only 20% of tropical forest area, they account for 40% of the total aboveground tropical forest carbon. We show that global IFL extent has been reduced by 7.2% since the year 2000. An increasing rate of global IFL area reduction was found, largely driven by the tripling of IFL tropical forest loss in 2011-2013 compared to that in 2001-2003. Industrial logging, agricultural expansion, fire, and mining/resource extraction were the primary causes of IFL area reduction. Protected areas (International Union for Conservation of Nature categories I to III) were found to have a positive effect in slowing the reduction of IFL area from timber harvesting but were less effective in limiting agricultural expansion. The certification of logging concessions under responsible management had a negligible impact on slowing IFL fragmentation in the Congo Basin. Fragmentation of IFLs by logging and establishment of roads and other infrastructure initiates a cascade of changes that lead to landscape transformation and loss of conservation values. Given that only 12% of the global IFL area is protected, our results illustrate the need for planning and investment in carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation efforts that target the most valuable remaining forests, as identified using the IFL approach.

Our essay in the American Journal of Botany (Chazdon and Laestadius, 2016) referred to the global map of opportunities for restoration of forests and landscapes as an important catalyst for a global restoration process. The areas indicated on this map as candidates for deeper examination at a national or subnational scale were selected among lands where tree cover has either been cleared or diminished. We recognize that many of these areas also contain native grassland and fully agree with Veldman et al. (2017) that native grasslands should not be converted to forests. We do not promote afforestation of grasslands in our essay, nor do the authors of the map (Laestadius et al., 2012, 2015). We disagree with Veldman et al. (2017) that the global map poses a threat to native grasslands. The map is not a prescription for wall-to-wall reforestation but an indication of opportunities for Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR), which aims to improve ecological integrity and enhance human well-being in deforested and degraded landscapes, including active agricultural landscapes where native grasslands have previously been destroyed by agricultural land use (Chazdon and Laestadius, 2016). Moreoever, as its creators have clearly stated: “The map shows the location of land with characteristics that indicate restoration opportunities, but it does not prescribe any particular type of restoration intervention. It is intended to inform the policy-making process at the global level and should be complemented by further investigation at regional and national scales, where more detailed information is needed and available” (Laestadius et al., 2012; p. 48). The global map and the interactive Atlas of Forest Restoration Opportunities are being used as a catalyst for high-level restoration commitments (Bonn Challenge, 2017), not as a substitute for the more detailed and informed analysis at scales closer to the ground that will be undertaken during the implementation process. Our essay reflects our own personal views and is not a product of the World Research Institute (WRI) or International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In our essay, we did not advocate particular restoration interventions for specific locations or site conditions. Rather, our essay addressed the need and the challenges in bringing together sectors with different roles and perspectives to support difficult and highly consequential decisions, including how and where to restore forest within landscapes. It is critical that scientific information from many fields of inquiry be available, communicated, and used in that process, including in determining areas that should not be targets for increasing tree cover. It is also critically important that this scientific information be delivered to the policy table in a way that engenders its uptake. The comments of Veldman et al. (2017) provide a rich case in point. The repeated attacks on the approach of the WRI/IUCN/University of Maryland reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the realities of science-based policy making. As we emphasized in our essay, politicians and scientists use evidence and language differently, for valid professional reasons. Scientists can choose to remain within their domain and communicate only with other scientists who share their culture of using precise technical language and attention to details. But if scientists choose to move outside of this comfort zone and aim to communicate meaningfully with policy makers, accusatory statements and insistence on a rigid scientific point of view will not be fruitful. While we join with Veldman et al. (2017) in encouraging scientists and policy makers to acknowledge the unique and irreplaceable conservation value of tropical savannas, we maintain that the path toward a shared vision requires a spirit of engagement, practicality, and openness.

Dryland biomes cover two-fifths of Earth's land surface, but their forest area is poorly known. Here, we report an estimate of global forest extent in dryland biomes, based on analyzing more than 210,000 0.5-hectare sample plots through a photo-interpretation approach using large databases of satellite imagery at (i) very high spatial resolution and (ii) very high temporal resolution, which are available through the Google Earth platform. We show that in 2015, 1327 million hectares of drylands had more than 10% tree-cover, and 1079 million hectares comprised forest. Our estimate is 40 to 47% higher than previous estimates, corresponding to 467 million hectares of forest that have never been reported before. This increases current estimates of global forest cover by at least 9%.

Significance Most nations recently agreed to hold global average temperature rise to well below 2 °C. We examine how much climate mitigation nature can contribute to this goal with a comprehensive analysis of “natural climate solutions” (NCS): 20 conservation, restoration, and/or improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands. We show that NCS can provide over one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now and 2030 to stabilize warming to below 2 °C. Alongside aggressive fossil fuel emissions reductions, NCS offer a powerful set of options for nations to deliver on the Paris Climate Agreement while improving soil productivity, cleaning our air and water, and maintaining biodiversity.

A global analysis indicates that more than 2 billion ha of cleared and degraded forest lands—an area twice the size of China—are not in productive agriculture or human habitation. Restoring these lands represents an immense opportunity to improve food security, human livelihoods, water supplies, climate stability, and natural resource management demonstrated through successful examples of restoration in Niger, Nepal, Brazil, India, and Ethiopia. However, challenges remain. It is essential to assess the motivation for restoration, the enabling conditions, and the factors that make implementation possible. Before rushing into restoration decisions, it is important to recognize that returning a landscape to its former ecosystem may not be possible (or even desirable) in some places. In order to create resilient landscapes for the 21st century, we need to simultaneously restore forests and increase the productivity of existing agricultural lands, which support human livelihoods and well-being.

We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring forest and landscape restoration requires additional approaches to defining and assessing forests that reveal the qualities and trajectories of forest patches in a spatially and temporally dynamic landscape matrix. New technologies and participatory assessment of forest states and trajectories offer the potential to operationalize such definitions. Purpose-built and contextualized definitions are needed to support policies that successfully protect, sustain, and regrow forests at national and global scales. We provide a framework to illustrate how different management objectives drive the relative importance of different aspects of forest state, dynamics, and landscape context.

The global restoration movement is gaining momentum. International and national leaders are demonstrating unparalleled political will for achieving ambitious targets. However, the knowledge base for implementing large-scale forest and landscape restoration (FLR) needs further development. Besides application of scientific and local knowledge, a broad understanding of the social, economic, and environmental context in which this knowledge is being applied is also needed. To address knowledge gaps and guide implementation of FLR at local to global scales we propose a knowledge creation agenda that we derive from emerging policy goals. We present a holistic approach that addresses food security, ecosystem services, and livelihoods, and that supports implementation by a wide array of actors from farmers and municipalities to corporations and state agencies. Our knowledge creation agenda is based on six broad policy goals, with several associated knowledge gaps for each goal. We recognize that this agenda is simply a starting point and will surely evolve and become more locally focused as the concept of FLR gains ground and as multiple groups of stakeholders engage in the long-term process of restoring functionality and value to ecosystems and landscapes around the world.

In his Perspective “Ancient grasslands at risk” (8 January, p. [120][1]), W. J. Bond makes a compelling argument for the need to identify, study, and preserve ancient grassland ecosystems because of their ecological importance. We strongly agree. However, we disagree with his claim that our