Reforesting cleared land often fails because no one understands why it happens or who it helps. This project will analyse high-resolution public data from Mexico, Brazil, India, and Nepal to identify the social and economic conditions that drive successful reforestation—not just the ecological ones. Current knowledge focuses heavily on deforestation, leaving reforestation as a poorly understood process. Without knowing what triggers forest recovery or how it affects local communities, restoration projects risk wasting money or displacing people. This study fills that gap by comparing multiple countries at an unprecedented scale. If successful, the research will produce a new “Sustainable Forest Transitions” framework that classifies pathways linking forest regrowth with human development. That framework could reshape how governments and funders design restoration interventions—shifting them from guesswork to evidence-based planning. The project also builds stakeholder tools for evaluating whether a reforestation programme is both environmentally effective and socially just. This is applied, policy-relevant science: it aims to improve how billions of pounds in global restoration funding are spent, not to generate fundamental knowledge for its own sake.
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Reversing forest loss is essential for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Although scholars have devoted much attention to deforestation, our knowledge of processes driving the reverse phenomenon - reforestation, and their socioeconomic implications are poorly understood. This lack of understanding significantly risks undermining forest restoration efforts that are both environmentally effective and socially just. This proposal will go beyond the state-of-the-art by leading the most rigorous, multi-site comparative study of reforestation processes driving transitions from deforestation to reforestation and their socioeconomic outcomes in forest landscapes. The project will combine and analyse high-resolution public social and environmental datasets at an unprecedented scale in four countries with globally important forest cover (Mexico, Brazil, India, Nepal). Results will deliver a needed step-change in understanding of processes driving simultaneous improvements in forest cover and human development, allowing me to develop a new, empirically-grounded framework of "Sustainable Forest Transitions". This new framework will generate a paradigm shift in how we think about FT by also considering their social outcomes. The framework will classify drivers of simultaneous improvements in forest cover and human development into distinct pathways that can be linked to broader political and economic processes shaping forest landscapes. These links will expand and pave the way for future forest-sector research by providing new entry points for other disciplines to study social and environmental outcomes of reforestation processes, including political economy, political ecology, and economics. The project's methodological and data-driven innovations will also allow my team and I to develop stakeholder tools to support the design and evaluation of forest-restoration interventions.
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