Sustainable Reforestation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (REFOREST)

Reversing forest loss is essential for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Although scholars have devoted much attention to deforestation, our knowledge of processes driving the reverse phenomenon - reforestation, and their socioeconomic implications are poorly understood. This lack of understanding significantly risks undermining forest restoration efforts that are both environmentally effective and socially just. This proposal will go beyond the state-of-the-art by leading the most rigorous, multi-site comparative study of reforestation processes driving transitions from deforestation to reforestation and their socioeconomic outcomes in forest landscapes. The project will combine and analyse high-resolution public social and environmental datasets at an unprecedented scale in four countries with globally important forest cover (Mexico, Brazil, India, Nepal). Results will deliver a needed step-change in understanding of processes driving simultaneous improvements in forest cover and human development, allowing me to develop a new, empirically-grounded framework of "Sustainable Forest Transitions". This new framework will generate a paradigm shift in how we think about FT by also considering their social outcomes. The framework will classify drivers of simultaneous improvements in forest cover and human development into distinct pathways that can be linked to broader political and economic processes shaping forest landscapes. These links will expand and pave the way for future forest-sector research by providing new entry points for other disciplines to study social and environmental outcomes of reforestation processes, including political economy, political ecology, and economics. The project's methodological and data-driven innovations will also allow my team and I to develop stakeholder tools to support the design and evaluation of forest-restoration interventions.