RESTORE+: Addressing Landscape Restoration on Degraded Land in Indonesia and Brazil

The project aims to provide decision/policy making actors in the tropical basins with lasting capacity, technical recommendations and enhanced datasets that enable sustainable addressing of degraded and/or marginal lands. Such capacity will be built upon comprehensive assessments of applying different definitions of degraded/marginal land and possible scenarios of restoration or utilization. Appropriate utilization of degraded/marginal land will ease pressure on deforestation and forest degradation which will positively impact mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the project will conduct sustainability analyses to help ensure that degraded/marginal land can be treated appropriately thereby balancing economic development with long-term impacts of increases in carbon stock and biodiversity preservation and restoration.

In Indonesia, IIASA’s global land use model (GLOBIOM) will be downscaled to the national level to analyze dynamics of varying land use policies that include an array of degraded/marginal land utilization scenario. Continuing efforts from the previous REDD-PAC project, downscaled GLOBIOM model in Brazil will be utilized to further analyze the implementation scenarios of Brazil’s new Forest Code and land cadaster system.

ESM citizen-science based tools and analyses (Geo-Wiki) will also be deployed to map potential degraded/marginal land in high resolution. Utilizing crowd-empowered data gathering methods, information that is gathered can go beyond bio-physical properties, but also social issues that are normally attributed to degraded/marginal land.

Finally, the restoration and utilization cycle will look specifically into bioenergy commodities to close the full cycle of land-based resource utilization. The BeWhere model will be used to assess various supply chain implication of varying policy scenarios to utilize degraded/marginal land for bioenergy. Such analysis will merge land use and energy sector perspective for landscape energy planning focusing particularly in Indonesia.