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

扭转森林损失对减缓气候变化和保护生物多样性至关重要。尽管学者们对砍伐森林给予了很大的关注，但我们对推动反向现象--重新造林--的过程及其社会经济影响的了解很少。这种缺乏了解的情况极有可能破坏既对环境有效又对社会公正的森林恢复努力。这项提议将超越最先进的水平，领导关于重新造林过程及其在森林景观中的社会经济结果的最严格的、多地点比较研究，以推动从砍伐森林到重新造林的转变。该项目将在具有全球重要森林覆盖率的四个国家(墨西哥、巴西、印度、尼泊尔)以前所未有的规模合并和分析高分辨率的公共社会和环境数据集。这些成果将在理解推动森林覆盖率和人类发展同时改善的进程方面产生必要的变化，使我能够制定一个新的、以经验为基础的“可持续森林过渡”框架。这一新框架还将考虑英国《金融时报》的社会后果，从而改变我们对它们的看法。该框架将把森林复盖率和人类发展同时改善的驱动因素归类为不同的路径，这些路径可与塑造森林景观的更广泛的政治和经济进程相联系。这些联系将为未来的林业部门研究提供新的切入点，为研究重新造林过程的社会和环境结果，包括政治经济学、政治生态学和经济学提供新的切入点，并为未来的林业部门研究铺平道路。该项目的方法和数据驱动的创新还将使我和我的团队能够开发利益攸关方工具，以支持森林恢复干预措施的设计和评估。

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.