Period: APRIL 2024 – April 2026
Considering local demand for more effective restoration in Madagascar (Demand4Restoration)
Funders: Swiss National Science Foundation
Forests sustain biodiversity, regulate climate, and deliver multiple Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs), making them essential for sustainable development. Tree-based restoration often ignores current land use and local demands for multiple NCPs and restoration practices, especially when focusing solely on carbon goals. This illustrates that we need solution-oriented research on how to design tree-based restoration interventions that simultaneously deliver on multiple locally demanded NCPs in an equitable way, thereby maximizing the potential of achieving social and ecological restoration effectiveness.
The Demand4Restoration project will systematically integrate restoration demand – which we define as the demand for restoration per se, for restoration at certain locations, for certain NCPs, and for certain types of restoration practices by various local, regional, national, and international actors – in restoration science and practice..
Planned activities:
We will first assess the social and ecological restoration effectiveness of more than 30 implemented restoration interventions by applying the NCP-multifunctionality framework and identifying predictors of restoration effectiveness.
Second, we build target knowledge on spatially explicit restoration demand in three Malagasy regions (covering humid forest, transition forest, dry forest, and mangrove) to find out who wants which land to be restored in what way.
Thirdly, we use these results to co-create three restoration projects that systematically integrate restoration demand, creating transformation knowledge on achieving social and ecological restoration effectiveness.
The project enables future restoration interventions to better satisfy local restoration demand, and thereby holds the premise to deliver the NCPs that people depend on, co-benefitting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.