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

扭转森林损失对于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，但我们对推动相反现象的过程-重新造林及其社会经济影响的了解却很少。这种缺乏了解的情况很有可能破坏既具有环境效益又具有社会公正性的森林恢复努力。该提案将超越最先进的水平，对推动从毁林向重新造林过渡的重新造林进程及其对森林景观的社会经济后果进行最严格的多地点比较研究。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）以前所未有的规模联合收割机和分析高分辨率的公共社会和环境数据集。结果将提供一个必要的步骤的变化，在森林覆盖率和人类发展的驱动过程的同时改善的理解，使我能够开发一个新的，可持续的森林过渡的基础框架。这一新框架将通过考虑其社会后果，在我们如何看待FT方面产生范式转变。该框架将把同时改善森林覆盖率和人类发展的驱动因素分为不同的途径，这些途径可以与塑造森林景观的更广泛的政治和经济进程联系起来。这些联系将通过为其他学科提供新的切入点来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，为未来的森林部门研究铺平道路。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.