The Bonn Challenge, a global effort to begin restoring 350 million hectares of degraded forest landscapes by 2030, was launched in 2011. To date countries have committed to restore more than 60 million hectares as part of the Bonn Challenge. As global decision‐makers, governments, and communities join the effort to restore degraded land, new questions about the economics of restoration have emerged. Critics argue that restoration takes too long, costs too much, and produces too few benefits to justify public or private expenditures. This paper addresses these concerns by presenting a methodology for valuing the net benefits of large‐scale ecosystem restoration initiatives by estimating the net benefit of achieving the Bonn Challenge. This paper also estimates the net benefit of achieving the Bonn Challenge restoration target under different social discounting regimes, different valuations of public goods, and different time horizons to see how they affect the argument for investing society's scarce resources in restoration. The results suggest that achieving the Bonn Challenge would generate a net benefit of between U.S.$0.7 and U.S.$9 trillion. The results show that restoration can create benefits that exceed its costs and that the value of these benefits might differ depending on the discount rate. The results show that lower social discount rates correspond to higher restoration rates. This suggests that the Bonn Challenge target is more likely to be met when a low social discount rate is used to discount the benefits and costs of restoration.

Forest loss and degradation globally has resulted in declines in multiple ecosystem services and reduced habitat for biodiversity. Forest landscape restoration offers an opportunity to mitigate these losses, conserve biodiversity, and improve human well-being. As part of the Bonn Challenge, a global effort to restore 350 million hectares of deforested and degraded land by 2030, over 30 countries have recently made commitments to national forest landscape restoration. In order to achieve these goals, decision-makers require information on the potential benefits and costs of forest landscape restoration to efficiently target investments. In response to this need, we developed an approach using a suite of ecosystem service mapping tools and a multi-objective spatial optimization technique that enables decision-makers to estimate the potential benefits and opportunity costs of restoration, visualize tradeoffs associated with meeting multiple objectives, and prioritize where restoration could deliver the greatest benefits. We demonstrate the potential of this approach in Uganda, one of the nations committed to the Bonn Challenge. Using maps of the potential benefits and costs of restoration and efficiency frontiers for optimal restoration scenarios, we were able to communicate how ecosystem services benefits vary spatially across the country and how different weights on ecosystem services objectives can affect the allocation of restoration across Uganda. This work provides a generalizable approach to improve investments in forest landscape restoration and illuminates the tradeoffs associated with alternative restoration strategies.

Restoring degraded forests and agricultural lands has become a global conservation priority. A growing number of tools can quantify ecosystem service tradeoffs associated with forest restoration. This evolving "tools landscape" presents a dilemma: more tools are available, but selecting appropriate tools has become more challenging. We present a Restoration Ecosystem Service Tool Selector (RESTS) framework that describes key characteristics of 13 ecosystem service assessment tools. Analysts enter information about their decision context, services to be analyzed, and desired outputs. Tools are filtered and presented based on five evaluative criteria: scalability, cost, time requirements, handling of uncertainty, and applicability to benefit-cost analysis. RESTS uses a spreadsheet interface but a web-based interface is planned. Given the rapid evolution of ecosystem services science, RESTS provides an adaptable framework to guide forest restoration decision makers toward tools that can help quantify ecosystem services in support of restoration.

The designation of geographical entities in this book, and the presentation of the material, do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Forest and Farm Facility, IUCN, FAO, IIED and AgriCord concerning the legal status of any country, territory, or area, or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of IUCN, FAO, IIED and AgriCord.

In 2011, the country of Rwanda made a commitment to restore the productivity of 2 million hectares of degraded forest and agricultural land. Agroforestry and improved woodlot management activities were proposed to restore the ecological and economic productivity of agricultural and forestland in Rwanda, but the activities have not been evaluated in terms of their financial profitability, profitability risk, or ecological impacts despite being significant factors that influence the adoption decisions of smallholder landowners who occupy the majority of land in the country. This paper evaluates the two activities from the perspective of risk-averse smallholders to show whether or not the activities are likely to be adopted. The paper presents a methodology that combines enterprise budgets, biological production functions and Monte Carlo analysis in an expected utility framework to investigate the financial profitability, financial risk and ecological impacts of the activities in a smallholder context in four provinces of Rwanda. Risk is accounted for by charactering the variability of financial and ecological outcomes, including profitability, crop and timber yields, erosion and carbon storage. The distributions of net present values of each activity are estimated and compared using stochastic dominance and certainty equivalence criteria in order to rank the activities. The results show that both activities are too risky from the perspective of smallholders. Internalizing the value of public ecosystem services does not change the results.