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RESUMO O Brasil tem uma longa história de políticas, pesquisa e prática de restauração de ecossistemas degradados. A Década da Restauração de Ecossistemas das Nações Unidas (2021-2030) foi lançada com o principal objetivo de prevenir, cessar e reverter a degradação de ecossistemas em todo o mundo. Neste artigo, descrevemos algumas experiências no Brasil e ilustramos como elas podem contribuir para o cumprimento desses objetivos. As ações de restauração florestal no Brasil são fortemente motivadas e lideradas por associações da sociedade civil descentralizadas, e coalizões e plataformas multissetoriais. Destacamos o papel crítico das inovações de governança nos níveis regional, estadual e municipal que fortalecem as ações de restauração, apesar da implementação deficiente das iniciativas do governo federal. ABSTRACT Brazil has a long history of policies, research and practice to restore degraded ecosystems. The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030) was launched with the primary objective of preventing, halting and reversing the degradation of ecosystems worldwide. Here, we describe some experiences with ecosystem restoration in Brazil and illustrate how they can contribute to achieving these goals. Forest restoration actions in Brazil are strongly motivated and led by decentralized civil society associations and multisectoral coalitions and platforms. We highlight the critical role of governance innovations at the regional, state and municipal levels that strengthen restoration actions despite the poor implementation of federal government initiatives.

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Made available in DSpace on 2022-04-28T19:49:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2022-03-01 Legal regulation related to restoration monitoring should be supported and validated by studies that evaluate the performance of indicators. In Brazil, a specific state regulation uses three indicators to attest recovery: ground cover with native vegetation (i.e. canopy cover, for tropical forest restoration projects) and density and richness of native plants spontaneously regenerating. Thus, we adopted other three ecological parameters: richness of zoochorous regenerant species (a functioning indicator linked to seed dispersal), the density of non-pioneer regenerants (a composition indicator), and dominance (a structure indicator), to test whether the indicators of the legal state monitoring protocol were associated to these more qualified indicators and we discussed the state protocol effectiveness. We evaluated 10 sites under restoration in the Atlantic Forest ranging from 9 to 45 years old and a reference area. Our results showed that the three indicators of the state monitoring protocol were associated to more qualified indicators in different restored sites and they can be considered proxies of ecological parameters to monitor and attest restoration success of tropical rainforest. In addition, dominance was strongly associated with richness of regenerants, but it was not associated to density, implying that richness and density of regenerants are not redundant and both should be monitored in the field. This kind of analysis could be usefully applied to define powerful and integrative indicators elsewhere, simplifying them without losing effectiveness as a means to stimulate wide adoption of monitoring protocols in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Departamento de Engenharia Ambiental Instituto de Ciência e Tecnologia Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, SP Departamento de Ecologia Instituto de Biociências Universidade de São Paulo, SP Secretaria de Infraestrutura e Meio Ambiente, SP Sociedade Brasileira de Restauração Ecológica, PR Centro de Engenharia Modelagem e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas Universidade Federal do ABC, SP Departamento de Engenharia Ambiental Instituto de Ciência e Tecnologia Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, SP

Globally, Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) is gaining widespread recognition from governments and policymakers for its potential to restore key ecosystem services and to improve human wellbeing. We organized an international conference on FLR, titled—Forest and Landscape Restoration: Making it Happen, between 25–27 February 2019 in Manila, the Philippines with 139 participants from 22 countries. The Forest and Landscape Restoration Standards (FLoRES) task force also met prior to the conference, which included a field visit to a pilot community-based forest reforestation site in Biliran Island, the Philippines. Based on the three-day conference, case study presentations, and FLoRES task force meeting, we prepared the Manila Declaration on Forest and Landscape Restoration to highlight the need to support quality of FLR efforts and outcomes in the tropics. Here we provide a synthesis of the main messages of the conference, with key outcomes including the Manila Declaration on Forest and Landscape Restoration, and ways forward to make quality FLR happen on the ground.

Achieving ambitious global restoration commitments is a huge challenge. The Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact, created in 2009 as a movement to restore 15 Mha of degraded/deforested lands by 2050, pledged 1 Mha towards the 2020 Bonn Challenge. We documented the restoration of an estimated 673,510–740,555 ha of native forests from 2011 to 2015 in the Atlantic Forest, and expect that a total of 1.35–1.48 Mha will be under recovery by 2020. The Pact is one of the first Brazilian restoration initiatives to monitor an international restoration commitment and to demonstrate that ambitious targets can be reached. Part of this success in large-scale restoration is related to three main Pact activities: (i) development of restoration governance, communication and articulation; (ii) promotion of strategies to influence public policies; and (iii) establishment of restoration monitoring systems. The experience and lessons learned by the Pact could inspire and inform other restoration initiatives worldwide.

Monitoring protocols are needed to evaluate the millions of hectares of land that are being proposed for forest restoration in the coming decades. Standardized proposals are critical to evaluate efficacy of restoration strategies, identify triggers for corrective actions, compare results across projects, and generally learn from past projects to inform future restoration efforts. We describe an iterative process, including over 200 stakeholders, to develop a protocol for monitoring Brazilian Atlantic Forest restoration. We give an overview of the ecological, socioeconomic, and management criteria, indicators, and metrics included in the protocol. Strengths of the protocol include the following: (a) testing and use across sites with a range of ages, forest types, past land uses, restoration techniques, and implementing institutions; (b) participation by a broad range of government, nongovernment, private, and academic institutions in the protocol development process; and (c) inclusion of socioeconomic and management criteria. Next steps for facilitating the broad adoption of the protocol in the Atlantic Forest region include providing in person and online training courses, establishing an online repository for storing and comparing monitoring data, and developing smartphone applications to facilitate data collection. Although the protocol was developed for the Atlantic Forest context and further refinements are needed, we think that the Atlantic Forest Pact monitoring protocol may serve as a model to inform the development of similar protocols in other regions, which ultimately could be integrated to produce a pantropical protocol for common use by several restoration forest programs worldwide.