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Forest restoration in Colombia to benefit biodiversity and people: who, how and where?
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Symposium

Forest restoration in Colombia to benefit biodiversity and people: who, how and where?

Mon, July 11, 10:30 - 12:30hrs, Room: 302

Organizer(s):

Paola Isaacs

To ensure ecosystem restoration delivers resilient landscapes that benefit biodiversity, ecosystem services and people’s wellbeing, the effect of meeting restoration targets needs to be well understood from both ecological and socio-economic viewpoints. We bring together scientists using diverse research approaches to tackle these difficult questions in the Colombian context.

Restoration of ecosystems has the potential to deliver multiple benefits for people and biodiversity, if done in the right way, with the right species, in the right places. In Colombia, multiple organisations are striving to meet ambitious targets to plant 180 million trees across 1 million ha of land by 2035, but this is against a background of ongoing deforestation and bad productive practices that causes degradation. There is an urgent need to better understand where and how restoration should take place in Colombia, in order to deliver multiple benefits for people while supporting Colombia’s exceptional and unique biodiversity. Restoration efficacy is constrained not only by biophysical constraints, such as soil degradation or distance from seed sources, but by the socio-economic context of landscapes and the peoples relying upon them. To ensure that forest restoration delivers resilient landscapes that benefit biodiversity, delivery of ecosystem services and people’s wellbeing, the effect of meeting restoration targets needs to be well understood from both ecological and socio-economic viewpoints. In this symposium, we bring together scientists using diverse research approaches to tackle these difficult questions in the Colombian context. Integrated spatial partial-equilibrium economic models of commodity demand under the shared socio-economic pathways allow exploration of how meeting restoration targets for Colombia impacts the land available for productive uses, and identifies the potential for distant, tele-coupled impacts on forest cover in geographically distant locations at the national scale. At the other end of the spatial scale, agent-based modelling of smallholder decisions about whether or not to restore forests on farmland sheds light on how local conditions can affect landscape-scale forest cover. At the mid-scale, restoring forest to conserve biodiversity requires a landscape-scale approach that improves connectivity to allow species movement and long-term persistence: models of connectivity and economic opportunity identify locations where forest recovery could deliver gains for biodiversity resilience. Finally, long term detailed work to understand how and where restoration projects have worked , and where they have not, can inform the next urgent steps to restore forest at scale in Colombia. By bringing together scientists and practitioners using diverse research methods and frameworks focussed on forest restoration in Colombia, this symposium will facilitate inter-disciplinary understanding that will support the socio-ecological resilience of restoration in one of the most important countries for biodiversity globally.


Integrated economic and spatial modelling of scenarios of forest restoration in Colombia: Balancing biodiversity with production
Eleanor Warren-Thomas*, Juliana Arbeleaz Gaviria, John Chavarro, Paola Isaacs, Julia Jones, David Leclère, Jose Ochoa-Quintero, Andres Peña, Natalia Peña, Isabel Rosa and Piero VIsconti

Scenarios of forest restoration priorities in Colombia
Marcelo Villa*, Paola Isaacs, Jose Ochoa-Quintero, Renato Crouzeilles, Marina Schmoeller, Sofía López-Cubillos and Brooke Williams

Monitoring forest restoration progress in Colombia: Creating a database of public and private projects
Natalia Peña*, Mauricio Aguilar-Garavito, Paola Isaacs and Eleanor Warren-Thomas

An agenda for forest landscape restoration: a Colombian perspective
Paola Isaacs*, Mauricio Aguilar-Garavito and Wilmer Marin

Planting 180 million trees in Colombia: meeting the challenge of a successful ecological restoration through regional involvement and strong networking
CAROLINA ALCAZAR CAICEDO*, Edwin Bello, Daniel García, Roy Gonzalez-M., Angelica Hernandez-Palma, Ronald Ayazo, Maria Torres, Carolina Castellanos-Castro, Laura Salinas, Leidy Celorio, Maria Teresa Becerra, Felipe García and Natalia Norden

Presentations

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