active· Governance

Building synergies between biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and rural prosperity through community forest governance

Forest restoration is a key environmental policy objective of the present era. In the UN’s present “Decade of Restoration”, countries around the world have pledged to restore hundreds of millions of hectares of degraded forests — targeting rural areas of the global south where millions of rural and indigenous people live. While these efforts have potential to support a range of environmental priorities, it remains unclear to what extent large-scale restoration efforts are compatible with rural needs and other development objectives. Responding to growing calls for strengthening community rights and involvement, we ask: How, and under what conditions, can community forest governance lead to improvements in human well-being, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity from forest restoration? This mixed-methods project explores how national and state-level policy efforts in Nepal and India shape local influence in restoration planning, and we build a large dataset to test how different local governance conditions impact livelihoods, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity. In so doing, our work provides key advances to (a) better incorporate multi-scalar power and politics in theories of environmental governance, (b) generate new evidence of the relationship between carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and rural well-being, and (c) support policy innovations to advance toward a more just and sustainable global future.