People-Centric Nature-Based Land Restoration through Agroforestry: A Typology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Specific observations and comments

1. The article main objective is to determine different typologies of restoration interventions.
2. Study area is confused: worldwide, regional or local sites? Just at the end of the text (Lines 491-492) authors indicate “…operational areas of the Forests, Trees and Agroforestry program of the CGIAR…”.
3. Authors use a qualitative, storyline approach based on extensive brainstorming, discussions and conceptual analysis, without formal, measurable data. Therefore, they do not generate new, original, actual results. There are no sound, replicable results of degradation/restoration types (see Table 2-Lines 426-434).
4. Linked to the previous observation, “results” are based on many subjective statements such as: “…human capacity to adapt to gradual processes of degradation can be the main obstacle to transformative change…” (Lines 258-259), “…integration across sectors of society is a logical response…” (382), “…Developing tourism increases pressure on natural resources, but also provides a financial basis for restorative innovation…” (385/6), “…External involvement tends to have a ‘moral hazard’ aspects, as the costs should morally be borne by those who benefitted from the destruction…” (398/9).
5. There is also an abuse of neologisms and a misuse of concepts in order to justify the proposed assessments and results. For example: global teleconnections, symptom/syndrome, leverage points or factors, ecological intensification, farm-gate profitability, “special places”, water towers, food security, miniature universes (in reference to small island), (“self-sustained”) multifunctional landscapes, coinvestment prototypes, intervention options (instead of land use or land management), the “boundary work”, restorative innovation or innovative restoration, “people-centric restoration”.
6. The Sierpinsky fractal is a mathematical, geometric method applied, for example, in time series, signal oscillations, or chaos analyses which is not the case in this paper (Line 251-Figure 5). Authors used it in a decorative way to represent quite different issues and without formal explanations.
7. The major contribution of the article is the definition of four types of restoration intensities (Lines 311-313) but without a hard-data basis. Additionally, there are restrictions: why only policy issues for recuperation (R3) or international support for remediation (R4) or regeneration for local scale (R2)?
8. Re-definition of ecosystem restoration is not needed. In 2019, the Society of Ecological Restoration (SER) published an updated version of the 2004-Principles keeping the classic definitions of degradation and restoration. In this paper, a biased definition of restoration is proposed. The authors state that restoration “…not necessarily recovering past system states…” (Lines 17, 128). If a previous state is not recovered there is no restoration or rehabilitation! Otherwise is replacement or another condition (e.g. different agricultural systems). The conclusion “The typology presented in its paper can support a broader and more precise understanding of the very notion of restoration… Moreover, because it is precisely grounded… it can help the diverse categories of actors to be involved understand the diversity of their objectives and find a common ground uniquely adapted to the specificity of the situation…”, is wrong. It seems that authors` intentions are replace the term “ecosystem restoration” by (just, “plain”) restoration, likely to justify their land management interests. The “ecosystem restoration” term is used only once (Line 38) whereas “restoration” 90 times.
9. One of the milestones of restoration science is the “reference ecosystem”. Major questions associated to this concept are: which is the desire successional stage of recovery?, which species (or group of species) is the target to rehabilitate with a given technique or management option?, which is the expected time of recovery (ETR) of the degraded ecosystems after initial treatment of management (months, years, decades)? Is ETR socially accepted, economically feasible and ecologically reasonable? None of these key, basic questions can be solved with the proposed types of restoration intensities.
10. The “Special places” issue is confused, limited. There is a contradiction regarding the scale and the audiences: local (agroforestry in Indonesia) or global (17 SDGs from the United Nations)? Only the degradation of riparian environments has worldwide relevance. The other five “places” have local relevance; they are rare not “common interventions in land restoration…” as stated by the authors.
11. Although authors considered a multicultural approach and local realities, there is a strong influence of visions from central countries (Europe, USA-Canada, Australia). Some concepts and approaches do not necessarily apply in most countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America: “self-sustained” multifunctional landscape, food security, payments for ecosystem services.
12. The Forest Transition model is a particular case of the previous comment. It is a controversial concept. Many colleagues disagree due to the confusion between true and false states and transitions. In this article (Table 2), the open-field agriculture (stage 5) and the (peri)urban landscape (stage 6) are completely driven by anthropogenic changes instead of natural factors (true transitions). Therefore, the concept is a fallacy: transitions from old growth forest to human environments (without forests) do not exist.
13. In 2020, ultimate causes of land degradation cannot be ignored by restoration scientists and practitioners: land use and land cover changes are mostly driven by overpopulation and overconsumption. In this article, the assessments only considered proximate or underlying drivers of degradation. Therefore, the proposed solutions and conclusions are biased, incomplete. If we do not change the dominant socio-economic model, environmental degradation will continue.
14. The paper style is neither a Review nor a full Article. It resembles a Monograph, an Opinion Article or a free Essay. Authors use revision tools but the article is not structured in proper Review format. Moreover, article organization and the selection of sections are confused, the text is repetitive (too many redundancies), hard to follow.
15. In summary, the article has very little value: do not provide practical results for practitioners, scientists, and decision makers in land restoration. Conclusions do not arise from valid results.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

"We would like to thanks Reviewer_1 for the detailed comments that have certainly helped us improve the clarity of the manuscript. Our responses are preceded by **.

The article main objective is to determine different typologies of restoration interventions.

** We further clarify our ambition to reconcile the 'ecological restoration' paradigm with the  'sustainable intensification' one, with agroforestry as meeting point, through a typology of contextualised intervention options 

Study area is confused: worldwide, regional or local sites? Just at the end of the text (Lines 491-492) authors indicate “…operational areas of the Forests, Trees and Agroforestry program of the CGIAR…”.

** We clarified our 'pantropical' ambitions, later on expanded to include part of the subtropics as CGIAR mandate domain

Authors use a qualitative, storyline approach based on extensive brainstorming, discussions and conceptual analysis, without formal, measurable data. Therefore, they do not generate new, original, actual results. There are no sound, replicable results of degradation/restoration types (see Table 2-Lines 426-434)

** Indeed, our paper lays the groundwork for global comparative studies within or explicitly between cells of the option-by-context typology.

Linked to the previous observation, “results” are based on many subjective statements such as: “…human capacity to adapt to gradual processes of degradation can be the main obstacle to transformative change…” (Lines 258-259), “…integration across sectors of society is a logical response…” (382), “…Developing tourism increases pressure on natural resources, but also provides a financial basis for restorative innovation…” (385/6), “…External involvement tends to have a ‘moral hazard’ aspects, as the costs should morally be borne by those who benefitted from the destruction…” (398/9).

** We have either removed these sentences or added specific references...

There is also an abuse of neologisms and a misuse of concepts in order to justify the proposed assessments and results. For example: global teleconnections, symptom/syndrome, leverage points or factors, ecological intensification, farm-gate profitability, “special places”, water towers, food security, miniature universes (in reference to small island), (“self-sustained”) multifunctional landscapes, coinvestment prototypes, intervention options (instead of land use or land management), the “boundary work”, restorative innovation or innovative restoration, “people-centric restoration”.

** We understand that reviewer doesn't like these words -- but each of them has considerable presence in the literature. The "in order to justify" infers motives that we don't recognize.

The Sierpinsky fractal is a mathematical, geometric method applied, for example, in time series, signal oscillations, or chaos analyses which is not the case in this paper (Line 251-Figure 5). Authors used it in a decorative way to represent quite different issues and without formal explanations.

** We have removed this figure, as we agree that our use of it can be seen as primarily 'decorative' -- what we meant to represent is probably better in the 'attractor' visualisation: attempts to initiate restoration/sustainable intensification can start at any of the five corners of the pentagon, but do need all the others, in a self-similar way. 

The major contribution of the article is the definition of four types of restoration intensities (Lines 311-313) but without a hard-data basis. Additionally, there are restrictions: why only policy issues for recuperation (R3) or international support for remediation (R4) or regeneration for local scale (R2)?

** Thank you, we have further highlighted this in abstract and conclusion. These are not exclusive but main levels of interventions. We clarified this in section 4.2 and elsewhere the text that the increasing levels of policy involvement and international support relate to complexity of the issues and the intensity of efforts == but that it is a quantitative scale, not a qualitative jump

Re-definition of ecosystem restoration is not needed. In 2019, the Society of Ecological Restoration (SER) published an updated version of the 2004-Principles keeping the classic definitions of degradation and restoration. In this paper, a biased definition of restoration is proposed. The authors state that restoration “…not necessarily recovering past system states…” (Lines 17, 128). If a previous state is not recovered there is no restoration or rehabilitation! Otherwise is replacement or another condition (e.g. different agricultural systems). The conclusion “The typology presented in its paper can support a broader and more precise understanding of the very notion of restoration… Moreover, because it is precisely grounded… it can help the diverse categories of actors to be involved understand the diversity of their objectives and find a common ground uniquely adapted to the specificity of the situation…”, is wrong. It seems that authors` intentions are replace the term “ecosystem restoration” by (just, “plain”) restoration, likely to justify their land management interests. The “ecosystem restoration” term is used only once (Line 38) whereas “restoration” 90 times.

** Here we may substantively differ in perspective opinion with the reviewer, but we have revised the text to avoid confusion. In our definition of 'Land restoration' we focus on restoration of functions rather than form, including considering functional interactions in all parts of landscapes, and including having sustainable 'agriculture/forestry' production as part of the set of goals that land managers may have in redressing past/ongoing degradation. We fully respect the 'ecosystem restoration' efforts and its associated science and principles, but propose here a broader umbrella to clarify the full perspective of 'stop degradation + recover damage' and addressing in a sustainable way the underlying drivers, including those related to the production function of the lands, and the needs of people living in it and from it. This need to reconcile these perspectives is, in our experience and view, critical to the sustained success of restoration and, especially relevant in the pan-tropical domain where the CGIAR operates.

One of the milestones of restoration science is the “reference ecosystem”. Major questions associated to this concept are: which is the desire successional stage of recovery?, which species (or group of species) is the target to rehabilitate with a given technique or management option?, which is the expected time of recovery (ETR) of the degraded ecosystems after initial treatment of management (months, years, decades)? Is ETR socially accepted, economically feasible and ecologically reasonable? None of these key, basic questions can be solved with the proposed types of restoration intensities.

** We thank the reviewer for this list of issues. These questions can be used to clarify key distinctions within the 'ecological restoration' domain and we discuss their counterparts within the agricultural/agroforestry perspective where similar 'reference' concepts are used (e.g. for soil properties), aiming exactly at bringing the perspectives together. One of the key proposition of the paper is to advance restoration science to a more complex set of objectives and functions to be restored. The confrontation, managing synergies and trade-offs between these functions, and at nested scales, is fundamental to answer the above  questions from the reviewer on the conditions to restore to a reference ecosystem, setting movement of stakeholders towards an overall multi-functional restoration (not degradation) in a landscape. Therefore, we extend the concept of reference ecosystem to reference socio-ecological system and resulting functions (in the broad framework the ecological functions and ecosystem services).

The “Special places” issue is confused, limited. There is a contradiction regarding the scale and the audiences: local (agroforestry in Indonesia) or global (17 SDGs from the United Nations)? Only the degradation of riparian environments has worldwide relevance. The other five “places” have local relevance; they are rare not “common interventions in land restoration…” as stated by the authors.

** We modified section 4.6 to better explain what we meant by “special places”. Reviewer's perspective "Only the degradation of riparian environments has worldwide relevance." does not match our experience and problem identification, but we took the need for further clarification of the issues here and the possibility that the list is not comprehensive.

Although authors considered a multicultural approach and local realities, there is a strong influence of visions from central countries (Europe, USA-Canada, Australia). Some concepts and approaches do not necessarily apply in most countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America: “self-sustained” multifunctional landscape, food security, payments for ecosystem services.

** We respectfully differ in opinion here with the reviewer, but have added some further references, especially on the Asian and African side, where a number of the co-authors originate and where all have worked and lived.

The Forest Transition model is a particular case of the previous comment. It is a controversial concept. Many colleagues disagree due to the confusion between true and false states and transitions. In this article (Table 2), the open-field agriculture (stage 5) and the (peri)urban landscape (stage 6) are completely driven by anthropogenic changes instead of natural factors (true transitions). Therefore, the concept is a fallacy: transitions from old growth forest to human environments (without forests) do not exist.

** We respectfully disagree again. In our paper we apply the broader concept of forest transition curve, that differs from concept natural forest transitions that the reviewers refers to. The concept of forest transition curve do include the cases where old grown forest have been replaced by degraded, anthropized environments. In the references we use, this  'forest transition curve' concept is discussed as a 'theory of place' (describing commonly repeated gradients), a 'theory of change' (describing temporal patterns of change in quality and quantity of tree cover), and as theory of induced change' (intervention planning). It is the latter that is specifically 'controversial', and linked to a 'driver' discussion. We're not on the same  page with the reviewer in the distinction of anthropogenic vs natural factors, but this is not the place to have that debate in full. we have made reference to the alternative perspectives that reviewer frames as common in the 'ecological restoration' domain. We are specifically puzzled by the last sentence of the reviewer, but assume there is some prior misunderstanding caused by our text, that we revisited to try to avoid such.

In 2020, ultimate causes of land degradation cannot be ignored by restoration scientists and practitioners: land use and land cover changes are mostly driven by overpopulation and overconsumption. In this article, the assessments only considered proximate or underlying drivers of degradation. Therefore, the proposed solutions and conclusions are biased, incomplete. If we do not change the dominant socio-economic model, environmental degradation will continue.

** Here we fully agree with the reviewer on the relevance of 'generic' driver change versus 'place-based' responses to pressures in the context of 'restoration'. Reviewer might even agree with the relevance of bringing the 'sustainable intensification' discussion under the 'land restoration' umbrella as we here seek to do. We hope that revisions in the text that more strongly articulate the mutual dependency of 'driver' (ultimate) and 'pressure' (proximate) level efforts to change course.

The paper style is neither a Review nor a full Article. It resembles a Monograph, an Opinion Article or a free Essay. Authors use revision tools but the article is not structured in proper Review format. Moreover, article organization and the selection of sections are confused, the text is repetitive (too many redundancies), hard to follow.

** The article is based on a synthesis of restoration initiatives and projects by the CGIAR and its partners worldwide over several decades. We have restructured the manuscript, also in view of comments of the other reviewers, and hope that we avoid the sense of repetition that reviewer had.

In summary, the article has very little value: do not provide practical results for practitioners, scientists, and decision makers in land restoration. Conclusions do not arise from valid results.

** We regret that our manuscript led reviewer to this conclusion, but we hope that our discussion here helped us more clearly articulate where the 'ecological restoration' perspective and the 'productive lands restoration' can mutually benefit from further interaction, respecting differences in starting point, but also a need to reconcile the two for achieving either of the goals.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Although the topic is of interest, and you have presented an impressive amount of information, however, the novelty and impact of the work is lacking. All the study is based in one survey that is not well presented. The statistic and quantitive analysis is missing throughout the manuscript. Maps and geographical locations is also missing. As a reader it wasn't easy to read and understand the manuscript. There are a lot of figures and ideas that are confusing. Please try to present only the main results. All the 23 pages look like a Chapter instead of a scientific paper.

Please find other comments in the attached file.

Best

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2

Thank you for the the general advise as well as specific comments in the text. We have tried to address them all: ** we provide answers throughout the text starting with **

Although the topic is of interest, and you have presented an impressive amount of information, however, the novelty and impact of the work is lacking.

**

All the study is based in one survey that is not well presented.

** Actually it was not... We use the separately published results of a survey of current activities in the CGIAR as background reference, and take its 'lack of coherent framing' as our starting point for a search of a more comprehensive and embracing typology

The statistic and quantitive analysis is missing throughout the manuscript.

** Linked with the previous question, we did not attempt quantification in the current manuscript, rather focus on what all needs to be considered in any, potentially quantitative, followup. Specifically for Southeast Asia, the reference van Noordwijk et al. (2020) zooms in further to specific site-level experience, using the framework developed in this manuscript.

Maps and geographical locations is also missing.

** See above

As a reader it wasn't easy to read and understand the manuscript. There are a lot of figures and ideas that are confusing. Please try to present only the main results. All the 23 pages look like a Chapter instead of a scientific paper.

** We have reduced the number of figures, referring to other places where these aspects are visualized

R1 Introduction too long

** As reviewer 2 had a similar concern, we have restructured the text, and now have a short introduction to the scope and content of the paper

R1 Imagination...

** We apologize that the sentence could be read in a way we had not intended -- the new text makes clear that 'imagination' refers to the general public's interest in tree-planting, rather than the thorough science of restoration ecology... 

Reference style

** We have changed the referencing from the active endnote format in Word that is useful to keep track of things before the text is finalized, to a 'fossilized' number system, that assumes that no further major changes to the text  or references will be needed.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Please review references, list of references are incomplete, for some references pages are not presented and font is not unified. 

Please find also attached document with corrections in the text (lines included).

Thank you,

Best regards,

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3

We thank you for the specific suggestions in the text that we have all addressed in the revised manuscript, prior to further changes as suggested by the other two reviewers. We hope that the splitting of the introduction into a short section outlining the scope and questions of the paper, followed by a review of relevant conceptual framings, helps on your concerns as well.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The new version did not improve major limitations: lack of sound results based on reliable, good data. Authors invested their efforts only to reinforce their viewpoints adding 50% more literature references and increasing circa 40% the text length with more statements and “politically correct” issues, regardless if I agree or disagree. New, original data were not included. The amount of results required to make the article publishable as a full paper, could not be completed in few weeks. It demands months of research or, in case of a Review paper, deep revisions and formal comparisons among paradigms.

I regret to confirm my conclusion: the article has very little value as a research contribution, particularly in land use planning, restoration ecology and environmental sciences.

Reviewer 2 Report

Great job  ! You have included the comments.

Best