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.