Forest Ecosystem Restoration Planning

Explore tropical forest planning solutions

The analyses presented here provide evidence-based decision-support for tropical forest restoration planning using a spatially explicit, multi-objective optimisation framework. Through the evaluation of a wide range of scenario and targets these analyses provide decision-makers with estimates of the climate mitigation and biodiversity benefits that may arise from various levels of forest restoration, and the opportunity and establishment costs associated with that restoration. These analyses can be used to address questions such as:

• What planning solutions provide the greatest returns-on-investment and how much more cost-effective are they than alternative solutions?
• To what extent is there a trade-off between carbon and biodiversity benefits and what opportunities are there to identify good compromise solutions?
• How do carbon and biodiversity benefits change as a function of the total area of forest restored?

The first version of the analyses considers carbon sequestration and species-specific extinction reduction benefits, opportunity and establishment costs, five restoration area targets, and quantifies trade-offs among objectives at each of those target levels. As new data becomes available these analyses will be updated. Further information on the versions of these analyses is provided in the table at the bottom of this page.

We welcome feedback and engagement regarding these analyses. We are working with several countries to develop bespoke implementations of these countries that more closely reflect national priorities and data. Please contact us if you wish to work with us to advance the planning framework for your country or region.

The links below provide two ways of accessing the planning analyses. The Interactive option is a page that presents graphical, map and tabular summaries of the scenarios in a way that fosters comparisons among the scenarios. The PDF report contains a more detailed narrative of the methods and analyses.

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National-scale planning analyses

Please use the links below to access the forest ecosystem restoration planning analyses for each country.

The table below summarises the differences between versions 1 and 2.

Version:	v001 (Dec 2020)	v002 (May 2021)
Establishment cost accounts for potential for natural regeneration	No	Yes
Opportunity cost	IIS 2020 estimates	Vincent & Yi 2021 estimates
Establishment cost	IIS 2020 estimates	Vincent, Kaczan, et al. 2021 estimates
Biodiversity	SPARC (~45,000 species)	SPARC (~103,000 species)
Species weightings	All species equal	Balanced among plants and animals
Species weighted by model performance	No, only strong models included	Yes, all models included and weighted by performance
Carbon	E. Broadbent (U Florida) Nov 2020 estimates	E. Broadbent (U Florida) Nov 2020 estimates
Number of points used to quantify trade-offs	5	10
Restoration increment (percent of available area)	2%	1%
Resolution and projection	1 km; Mollweide	1 km; Mollweide

The next version of the analysis will extend the area considered for reforestation, and will include confidence intervals around the estimates for biodiversity and climate change mitigation benefits.