Across the planet, the spatial overlap between poverty and forest cover is high, and the people that live in these regions rely on forests for both tangible forest products and indirect forest ecosystem services. Despite people’s dependence on forests, however, tropical deforestation rates are still high, which is problematic from both livelihoods and environmental perspectives. Spurred by these challenges, policy makers have been advocating widespread reforestation. The recent Bonn Challenge, for example, aspires to reforest 150 million hectares of degraded landscapes by 2020. What kind of forest these projects will restore is less clear. Ecological restoration projects have traditionally focused on restoring ecosystem function to establish self-sustaining ecosystems with historical fidelity. Under this definition, tree plantations, agroforestry and other ‘novel forest’ restoration projects that focus on enhancing livelihoods are often not considered to be real ‘restoration’ projects at all.
The broad challenge motivating this project, therefore, is how to design reforestation projects that meet the needs of local peoples while restoring true ecosystem function. Here we focus on the livelihoods aspect of this question, to ask: 1) What forest types and resources do people depend on for their livelihoods, and how do these vary by income, gender, and access to land?; and 2) How well do current reforestation projects balance livelihood and ecological goals? Fieldwork was conducted in Malawi—a sub-Saharan nation with high poverty, forest dependence, and deforestation—which has recently introduced policies to promote widespread forest restoration. We conducted household surveys to assess the types, amount, and location of forest use, and preferences for native vs exotic tree species. We also developed a preliminary framework for assessing ecological and social success in reforestation projects, and tested it by interviewing managers of current restoration projects in the region.
Results/Conclusions
We present the criteria and indicators developed to assess the ecological and social success of forest restoration projects in a tropical context. Interviews based on these criteria suggest that current restoration projects in Malawi focus primarily on meeting livelihoods goals through the planting of fast-growing multiple-purpose exotic species. Surveys showed that households rely on multiple tree species, including fast-growing exotics (e.g., Eucalyptus) and fruit trees (e.g., mango); contrary to expectations, slower-growing native species (e.g., Brachystegia spp.), are actually preferred but harder to access. The results suggest that there is much greater scope for aligning ecological and social criteria in restoration than projects are currently taking advantage of.