Demand4Restoration

Considering local demand for more effective restoration in Madagascar

Forests sustain biodiversity, regulate climate, and deliver multiple Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs), making their persistence essential for sustainable development. Past and ongoing exploitation has reduced forest extent and quality across tropical countries while profits have largely been exported to the Global North. This has benefitted the economies in the Global North that now recognize the urgency of restoring tropical forests as fundamental to sustainable development. However, tree-based restoration often ignores current land use and local demands for multiple NCPs and restoration practices, especially when focusing solely on carbon goals.

The key novelty of the Demand4Restoration project is the conceptualisation and systematic integration of restoration demand – which we define as the demand for restoration per se, for restoration at certain locations, for certain NCPs, and for certain types of restoration practices by various local, regional, national, and international actors – in restoration science and practice.

We set out this transdisciplinary project in Madagascar, which has lost 44% of its forest cover over the last 70 years. This highlights the importance of restoring tree-supported NCPs in a country where 75% of people directly depend on nature for their livelihoods.

Through its transdiscplinary approach, the project enables future restoration interventions to better satisfy local restoration demand co-benefitting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

People, funding, & contacts

My role: Leading Co-PI

Academic partners: University of Zurich (Prof Maria J. Santos), ESSA Forêt University of Antananarivo (Dr O. Sarobidy Rakotonarivo; Dr Manoa Rajaonarivelo), Centre Universitaire Régionale de la SAVA (Dr Thio Rosin Fulgence)

NGO partners: INDRI (Jean-Philippe Palasi), DLC SAVA (Dr James Herrera), TB-SE (Dr Jean Baptiste Ramanamanjato), E-RECODEV (Prof Hery Lisy Tiana Ranarijaona)

Funding: Solution-oriented Research for Development (SOR4D) program of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)

Duration: 2024-2027