Research Letters
Enhancing climate change resilience of ecological restoration — A framework for action

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pecon.2021.05.002Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Climate change needs considering in seven areas of restoration design/implementation.

  • These range from objective setting through to monitoring and adaptive management.

  • Evidence is scant for climate change resilient restoration in practice.

  • Our framework can help structure a more climate change resilient restoration approach.

Abstract

Ecological restoration is a tool for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and yet its outcomes are susceptible themselves to climate change impacts. Drawing on the literature documenting this in theory and practice, we present a comprehensive overview of climate change risks and considerations across the whole life cycle of a restoration initiative. The resulting framework identified seven areas of restoration design and implementation in which climate change is important to address: setting restoration objectives, selecting sites and managing connectivity, choosing target species and ecosystems, managing key ecosystem interactions and micro-climates, identifying and mitigating site-level climate change risks, aligning the project with long-term policies, and designing a monitoring framework that enables adaptive management. A scan of restoration projects focussing on two regions – Brazil and countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN – revealed limited inclusion of these considerations in practice, with less than 5% of the projects evidently addressing at least one of the seven areas. We discuss two projects showing good practice in climate resilient restoration: restoration of Atlantic forest in Brazil that plans for climate change in connectivity and hydrological management, species selection, and policy alignment, and crayweed underwater forest restoration in Sydney, Australia, whose careful attention to species provenance, genotype measurement and monitoring provided a “future-proofing” approach to restoration success in the long term. Building on such examples, our framework can be used as a tool to support global restoration targets and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 through more climate resilient restoration.

Keywords

Ecological restoration
Climate change
Adaptation
Resilience

Cited by (0)

1

Current address: Organic Research Centre, Trent Lodge, Cirencester GL7 6JN, United Kingdom.

2

Current address: Corporate Carbon Advisory Pty Ltd, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.