Editorial: Landscape management can promote socioecological benefits and leverage environmental markets

Abstract

Forested landscapes around the world face ever growing challenges in restoring resilience in the face of climate change. Large-scale disturbances, including wildfires and insect infestations, continue to grow in magnitude and destructiveness. Wildfires specifically pose major risks to human life and wellbeing. At the same time, forested landscapes produce innumerable benefits for society, including climate regulation through carbon sequestration, recreational opportunities, water provisioning, wood products, and more. The continued and reliable provisioning of these benefits relies on forested ecosystems that are resilient and healthy. However, achieving and maintaining resilience is costly, and requires considerable investment in landscape restoration activities.

Public lands in particular provide numerous opportunities for conservation work, and the environmental benefits they deliver to communities are well-documented. Forest management and landscape restoration on public lands is primarily funded by governments. The scale of restoration work needed is considerable. As a result, the funds required to perform the work oftentimes are beyond the reach of any one agency or organization. Important work that could reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, improve the provisioning of environmental benefits, and enhance overall forest resilience goes unattended, potentially putting the lives and wellbeing of current and even future generations at risk.

Given the high stakes of sustaining forests into the future, considerable attention is being paid to efforts that scale up the quantity and rate of restoration work being accomplished through traditional and non-traditional funding sources and payment mechanisms. Specifically, a diversity of public and private entities across the globe are collaborating on creating and enhancing functioning markets for environmental benefits that can facilitate new pathways for private investment into landscape restoration. In many countries, markets for environmental benefits have been established, though in many cases they are still emerging.

Research has a crucial role to play in developing and demonstrating methods and tools to credibly quantify costs and benefits in a manner that can support and bolster environmental markets and conservation finance. Demonstration landscapes have become an effective sandbox for research as a means of development and testing methods and tools to support real-time management and restoration activities. One such landscape—the Tahoe Central Sierra Initiative (TCSI), a 1-million-hectare landscape in the central Sierra Nevada, California, USA—inspired this Research Topic, including three of its papers. TCSI was established with the intention of reducing the risk of wildfire, improving forest health and sustainability, and serving as a demonstration and innovation landscape from which other landscape restoration projects could benefit. The development and implementation of conservation finance mechanisms is becoming a necessary element of large and complex landscape restoration efforts, particularly those dominated by public lands, such as TCSI.

Citation

Sloggy, Matthew R.; Manley, Patricia N.; Evans, Samuel. 2026. Editorial: Landscape management can promote socioecological benefits and leverage environmental markets. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2026.1944600