Restoring biodiversity and forest ecosystem services in degraded tropical landscapes

Abstract

Over the past century, an estimated 850 million ha of the world’s tropical forests have been lost or severely degraded, with serious impacts on local and regional biodiversity. A significant proportion of these lands were originally cleared of their forest cover for agricultural development or other economic uses. Today, however, they provide few if any environmental goods or services to society, and in particular to forest-dependent rural populations. Despite the scientific, social, economic, and policy challenges involved, the rehabilitation of degraded tropical forests and landscapes offers a major opportunity to both improve the livelihoods of the rural poor and to reverse the seemingly relentless tide of biodiversity loss and environmental degradation worldwide. Meeting this challenge requires an understanding of the underlying socio-economic, cultural and political drivers of deforestation and ecosystem degradation at local and broader spatial scales. These insights can be used to inform strategies for biodiversity conservation linked to enhancement of livelihoods, and development of innovative, participatory, approaches to forest restoration that combine the collective knowledge gained through decades of research in the fields of forestry and ecology, and the traditional knowledge of forest-dependent people who have the most to gain or lose in the process. This paper will explore a range of strategies and options developed and used in tropical countries to restore both biodiversity values and other economically and socially important environmental goods and services in degraded tropical forest landscapes.

Citation

Parrotta, John A. 2010. Restoring biodiversity and forest ecosystem services in degraded tropical landscapes. pp 53-61 in: Koizumi, Toru; Okabe, Kimiko; Thompson, Ian; Sugimura, Ken; Toma, Takeshi & Fujita, Kazuyuki. eds. The role of forest biodiversity in the sustainable use of ecosystem goods and services in agro-forestry, fisheries, and forestry, Proceedings of an international symposium for the Convention on Biological Diversity, Waseda University, Tokyo, April 26-28, 2010. Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Ibaraki, Japan, 106 pp.