Restoration-Centred Conservation

Historical development

The symbolic starting point is Aldo Leopold’s planting of the Curtis Prairie at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in 1935. William Jordan’s journal Restoration & Management Notes (1981) and the founding of the Society for Ecological Restoration (1988) turned restoration into a field. The Society’s Primer (2004) and its International Principles and Standards (2019) set down its practice.

The 1990s and 2000s brought large programmes in the Everglades, on the Rhine, on China’s Loess Plateau and in the forests of Costa Rica. They also brought “forest landscape restoration”, the Bonn Challenge (2011), the Aichi target to restore 15 per cent of degraded ecosystems, and finally the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–30). Recent debates have shaped the field’s thinking: on “novel ecosystems” (Richard Hobbs and colleagues), on reference states adjusted for climate change, and on restoration’s role in carbon markets.

Principal claims

• Damaged ecosystems can be largely recovered with deliberate help. Passive protection alone is not enough.
• Restoration should aim at a reference ecosystem, adjusted for environmental change, and be measured against it.
• Restoration brings benefits for biodiversity, carbon, water, livelihoods and culture at the same time.
• Local participation and knowledge are essential if restoration is to last.
• Restoration adds to the protection of intact ecosystems. It cannot replace it.

Policy implications

Restorationists support national and global restoration targets and the money to meet them, programmes of replanting and natural regrowth, restoration of rivers and wetlands, and control of invasive species. They want ecological standards that separate real restoration from simply planting trees. They favour linking restoration with farming through agroforestry and soil repair, and including it in climate policy, with safeguards.

Internal disagreements

Restorationists disagree about whether to aim at historical reference states, at states adjusted for a changing climate, or at new kinds of ecosystem. They differ on whether non-native species are acceptable, and on whether to restore for ecological integrity or for ecosystem services and carbon. They worry that restoration can be used to excuse destruction elsewhere, through offsets and mitigation banking. They also argue over letting land regrow by itself as against planting it.

Criticisms and controversies

Wilderness and non-interventionist traditions see restoration as arrogance and as a substitute for protection. Political ecologists point to the land grabs and displacement that tree-planting programmes have caused. Ecologists criticise single-species plantations sold as restoration, and the overselling of restoration’s potential to store carbon. The “restoration industry” is accused of licensing development.

Practitioners answer with standards that separate restoration from tree planting, and with the evidence of ecosystems that have recovered.

Relationships to other traditions

Restoration is the ecological core shared by ecological engineering, which designs for function; by rewilding and trophic rewilding, which restore processes and animals more than exact species mixes; by conservationism, which restores working land; and by planetary stewardship, which sets its global targets. It is at odds with wilderness preservation’s refusal to intervene. Market environmentalism’s offset schemes both use and draw criticism for it.