Why plant trees

Ecosystem restoration currently occupies an important place as one of the strategies for mitigating climate change impacts (Elias et al, 2021). Several global targets and agreements have been focused on restoring landscapes on a large scale in the past few years. The Aichi Target 15 of the Centre for Biological Diversity (CBD) aimed to restore 15% of the world's total degraded and converted area by 2020. The Bonn Challenge, launched in 2011, aimed to bring 150 million hectares of the world's deforested and degraded land into the process of restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030 (Fagan et al, 2020). More recently, as part of the UN Decade for Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), restoration is viewed as a nature-based solution that could help achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Elias et al, 2021).
Restoration has the potential to absorb carbon emissions, decrease biodiversity loss, and support local livelihoods, but recent literature indicates that there are both costs and benefits associated with restoration processes (Flesichman et al, 2020; Coleman et al, 2020). There is limited clarity on people's roles and incentives to engage in restoration initiatives. Within restoration research, there is a need to integrate social science theories for a better understanding of human-environment interactions (Fischer et al, 2021). Broadly, in sustainability science too, it has been identified that both local case studies, as well as globally coordinated research, are needed to understand interconnected systems (Liu et al, 2007). A few systematic efforts to map the areas with restoration potential indicate that a majority of these are located in the countries of the global South (Bastin et al, 2019; but see Veldman et al, 2019; Erbaugh et al, 2020). Given the importance of restoration in the coming decades, there is urgency in predicting how these restoration processes will unfold.
There are multiple ways to restore land including but not limited to tree plantations, agroforestry, eradication of invasive species, and allowing natural regeneration. Further, restoration processes vary considerably with the laws, ownership of land, national and international policies (Mercer, 2004). This research will focus on agroforestry as a restoration measure and will use case studies in India and Brazil to understand the incentives and spread of such initiatives on agricultural land.