Forest Transitions: From Restoration to Conservation and Everything in Between

About this Research Topic

Background

The Forest Transition Theory is a concept proposed in the early 1990s. It describes the changes a forest landscape, region or even country, experiences when its forest cover stops shrinking (due to deforestation) and starts expanding (due to reforestation or afforestation). Expansion can take place despite growing human populations (in both number and density); increased technical capacities (i.e., higher efficiency in transforming land covers); or changing cultural values (e.g., globalization, urbanization).

Globally, agricultural expansion represents the major driver of forest loss. The recovery of forest area is explained by the natural expansion of remaining forests (e.g., areas that have been abandoned); and active forest landscape restoration and plantation programs. During forest transitions, not only does the forest area change, but the quality of the forest may also undergo change, meaning forests at the end of this process are different from those at the beginning.

Policy interventions can facilitate or slow down a transition. Policies that aim to slow down or stop deforestation can, at best, flatten the curve of forest loss. Forest landscape restoration can potentially redress the curve to the maximum ecological potentialities of a given locality. Thus, Policies for both halting deforestation and restoring forest landscapes are equally important in managing and shaping the forest transition.

Over the years, several initiatives have been proposed to restore forests. In 2011—the UN International Year of Forests—and 2014, respectively, the Bonn Challenge and New York Declaration on Forests pledged to restore a total of 350 million hectares of forests by 2030. Under the UNFCCC’s 2016 Paris Agreement, some 150 nations proposed to monitor land use, land-use change, and forestry in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (the core of the Paris Agreement), to keep the global temperature from rising by 2°C. Despite all the pledges and ambitions, action to deliver on these multiple targets fell short.

For this Research Topic we are seeking papers that explore the nexus of forestation and policy to increase our understanding of the causal relationship and related feedback loops between forest policies and forest landscape changes. We aim to answer the following questions:

• What are enablers or disablers of forest change (deforestation/reforestation)?
• What are policies that were shown to be effective in pushing the transition?
• What were the baseline conditions facilitating such policies?
• Conversely, what were reasons for failures?

We welcome quantitative, evidence-based studies across temporal and spatial scales, as well as inter- and transdisciplinary studies.

Keywords: Forest Transition Theory, forest loss, forest landscape restoration, forest policy, policy intervention, forest change

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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