Sustainable forest transitions: a new analytical framework to understand social and ecological outcomes of reforestation

Restoring forests is key to addressing the climate and biodiversity crises and can benefit forest-dependent communities. Yet, frequent social and ecological trade-offs between these goals pose significant challenges for forest restoration efforts. Our understanding of how to maximise positive social and ecological restoration outcomes is hindered by the absence of a social-ecological theory of forest restoration. We present a new analytical “Sustainable Forest Transitions” framework to study the joint social and ecological outcomes of reforestation drivers. Our framework advances forest transition theory, the main existing framework for understanding reforestation drivers, by incorporating social outcomes and a wider set of ecological outcomes, paying particular attention to interactions between drivers and the socio-political contexts in which they operate. Advances in data availability, computing power, and causal inference methods allow our framework to be operationalised. Doing so could inform forest restoration actions that maximise benefits for climate, biodiversity and forest-dependent communities.