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

Published Article

Global

Publication date: May 16, 2025

File format: URL

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Forest restoration is essential for addressing climate change, biodiversity loss and community well‑being, yet trade‑offs between these goals remain common. This study introduces a sustainable forest transitions framework that unites social and ecological outcomes to better understand how reforestation drivers operate within diverse sociopolitical contexts. Building on traditional forest transition theory, the framework incorporates community benefits, ecological functions and interactions among drivers. Advances in data availability, computing power and causal inference now make such integrated analysis feasible. Applying this approach can help design restoration strategies that maximize benefits for climate mitigation, biodiversity recovery and forest‑dependent communities.

Subject Tags

  • Climate mitigation
  • Forest
  • Biodiversity

Abstract

Restoring forests is key to addressing the climate and biodiversity crises and can benefit forest-dependent communities. However, frequent social and ecological trade-offs between these goals pose significant challenges for forest restoration efforts. Our understanding of how to maximize 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 sociopolitical contexts in which they operate. Advances in data availability, computing power and causal inference methods allow our framework to be operationalized. Doing so could inform forest restoration actions that maximize benefits for climate, biodiversity and forest-dependent communities.

Citation

Oldekop, J. A., Devenish, K., Alencar, L., Erbaugh, J. T., Hernandez-Montilla, M., Jaiswal, S., ... & Pritchard, R. (2025). Sustainable forest transitions: A new analytical framework to understand social and ecological outcomes of reforestation. One Earth, 8(5). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101248

TNC Authors