Participatory Forest and Landscape Restoration
Locally led restoration that improves livelihoods and economic opportunities for local communities across the tropics
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We champion participatory productive restoration of degraded lands, empowering communities to take control and ensuring they benefit directly from their restoration efforts.
Globally, more than one billion hectares of land is degraded due to unsustainable land use practices and wildfires. This threatens local livelihoods, reduces biodiversity, and accelerates climate change. This damage can be reversed through restoration. However, restoration initiatives are often top-down efforts that focus on a few fast-growing tree species and overlook local community needs. The success rate of these projects is limited, as they tend to lack local support, especially when they restrict people’s access to the lands they depend on for their livelihoods.
Restoring degraded lands through participatory approaches offers a way to reverse environmental damage while enhancing local livelihoods. Local communities possess valuable knowledge about sustainable land use, and when they are empowered to lead restoration efforts, these initiatives are more likely to succeed. By tailoring restoration to local needs, the outcomes provide tangible benefits for communities while successfully transforming degraded areas into healthy, resilient ecosystems. Ideally, these restoration initiatives align with a broader vision for the landscape, ensuring they restore its ecological balance and productive potential.
We promote participatory and productive forest and landscape restoration that improves livelihoods and economic opportunities for local communities across the tropics.
We empower community-led restoration, share knowledge and showcase successes, and scale proven restoration approaches by supporting their integration into development programmes. Our approach is built around four key components:
To learn more about our initiatives or to collaborate with us, please contact Humberto Gómez, Thematic lead on Participatory Forest and Landscape Restoration at humberto.gomez@tropenbos.org
The Ethiopian National Drylands Restoration Strategy is a pivotal initiative. It addresses the degradation of the extensive dryland regions, which comprise approximately 70% of the country’s land area. Our partner, the Pastoral and Environmental Network in the Horn of Africa (PENHA), has made a crucial contribution to this endeavour, ensuring that the national-level strategy is adapted to regional contexts to maximize its effectiveness.
In 2023, a group of peasant and Indigenous youth engaged in participatory productive restoration in Colombia’s Solano landscape created the documentary series, Fire, Earth, Water and Air: stories of participatory productive restoration in Solano. The series presents peasant and Indigenous perspectives on the forested landscapes that they inhabit.
In Ethiopia, PENHA led the truly inclusive development of a national dryland restoration strategy that is widely supported across regions and government departments. This has inspired others to adopt a similar approach.
Tropenbos Colombia supported participatory productive restoration as an alternative approach to the government’s large-scale tree planting efforts. Tropenbos Colombia enabled farmers to establish restoration plots, supported inclusive landscape governance, and explored options for innovative financing.
For several years, Tropenbos Colombia has been promoting participatory productive restoration (PPR) as an alternative to top-down restoration projects. After taking root in 2020, PPR really started growing in 2021. More than 100 initiatives are now up and running, and enthusiasm for PPR is spreading.
Tropenbos Ghana has encouraged hundreds of farmers to start planting trees on riverbanks to support long-term access to water. In addition, it created a platform for stakeholders to provide input to a bill for Parliament to protect riparian buffer zones from human activities.