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Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is being carried out across the world to meet ambitious global goals. However, the scale of these efforts combined with the timeframe in which they are supposed to take place may compromise the quality of restoration, and thus limit the persistence of restoration on the landscape. This paper presents a synthesis of ten case studies identified as FLR to critically analyse implemented initiatives, their outcomes, and main challenges, with an eye to improving future efforts. The identified FLR projects are diverse in terms of their spatial coverage, objectives; types of interventions; and initial socioeconomic, institutional, and environmental conditions. The six principles of FLR—which have been widely adopted in theory by large global organisations—are inadequately addressed across the initiatives presented here. The identified FLR project or interventions, although expected to offer diverse benefits, face many challenges including the lack of long-term sustainability of project interventions, limited uptake by regional and national agencies, limited monitoring, reporting and learning, poor governance structures, and technical barriers, which are mainly owing to institutional weaknesses. On the basis of these cases, we propose that the best pathway to achieving FLR is via an incremental process in which a smaller number of more achievable objectives are set and implemented over time, rather than setting highly ambitious targets that implementers struggle to achieve.

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Growing evidence suggests that constraints to the availability and quality of tree seed can undermine the success of forest and landscape restoration efforts and the delivery of associated benefits such as mitigating climate change and halting biodiversity loss. Past experiences to promote tree seed supply have frequently shown limited outcomes over time, partly because of unexpected, deleterious dynamics that emerged from the interventions themselves. In this study, we used a dynamic system approach to understand the interrelated problems that constrain the supply of good quality and site-adapted tree seeds to meet smallholders' and other stakeholders' demand in Burkina Faso and the Philippines, and to identify leverage points for intervention. Causal loop diagrams were constructed for each country, based on a framework of indicators of effective tree seed supply systems, literature review, semistructured interviews, and expert validation. The diagrams illustrate the complex interactions between planned interventions and their expected and unexpected effects that frequently lead to adverse outcomes. For example, the high turnover of forestry officers in municipalities to combat corruption in Burkina Faso combined with limited resources to support smallholders undermined the officers' ability to strengthen local capacities in seedling production and sustainable forest management. In the Philippines, the imposition of rigid requirements for seedling survival rates as a condition for funding, in the absence of adequate time and resources for the production of quality seedlings and monitoring, resulted in exaggerated survival rates during reporting, which in turn hampered the detection and addressing of shortcomings. A dynamic system approach can help stakeholders recognize the broader impacts of their actions and jointly identify appropriate interventions, from developing more context-specific approaches to reconsidering investment criteria to balance benefits.