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。尽管学者们对森林砍伐投入了大量的关注，但我们对推动这种相反现象的过程——重新造林——及其社会经济影响的认识却很少。这种缺乏了解的情况有可能严重破坏既对环境有效又对社会公正的森林恢复工作。该提案将超越最先进的技术，领导最严格的、多地点的再造林过程比较研究，以推动从毁林到再造林的转变及其在森林景观中的社会经济成果。该项目将在四个具有全球重要森林覆盖的国家（墨西哥、巴西、印度和尼泊尔）以前所未有的规模整合和分析高分辨率公共社会和环境数据集。研究结果将在理解推动森林覆盖和人类发展同时改善的过程方面提供必要的阶段性变化，使我能够制定一个新的、基于经验的“可持续森林转型”框架。这个新框架将使我们对金融时报的看法发生范式转变，同时考虑它们的社会后果。该框架将把森林覆盖和人类发展同时改善的驱动因素分类为不同的途径，这些途径可以与形成森林景观的更广泛的政治和经济进程联系起来。这些联系将为其他学科（包括政治经济学、政治生态学和经济学）研究再造林过程的社会和环境结果提供新的切入点，从而扩大和铺平未来森林部门研究的道路。该项目的方法论和数据驱动创新也将使我和我的团队能够开发利益相关者工具，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.