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  • Matters Arising
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Restoration prioritization must be informed by marginalized people

Nature volume 607, pages E5–E6 (2022)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 13 July 2022

The Original Article was published on 14 October 2020

arising from: B. B. N. Strassburg et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2784-9 (2020)

The maps and analysis by Strassburg et al.1 should not be used by policy-makers in their current form, because of the risk of displacing marginalized people, compromising food security and undermining democratic processes. Their analysis was based on normative choices to value (that is, to optimize) relationships among biodiversity potential, carbon storage potential and cost effectiveness, without considering the well-being and rights of people who live in areas identified as restoration priorities, nor the implementation costs of changing land use. Although it may be informative to map the joint distribution of biodiversity, carbon and commodity prices, the absence of important socioeconomic values obscures both the costs and benefits to the Indigenous, forest-dependent and rural people who are directly affected by restoration interventions. We pose three cautionary questions that we believe must be answered before the maps produced by Strassburg et al.1 are used by decision-makers to motivate and implement restoration-promoting land-use policies.

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Acknowledgements

F.F., E.C., H.F., V.R. and C.R.S. were supported by NASA grant NNX17AK14G and Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas) grant 2020-02781. F.F. and H.F. were supported by Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) grant 2018-05875. J.W.V. was supported by USDA-NIFA Sustainable Agricultural Systems grant 2019-68012-29819, USDA-NIFA McIntire-Stennis Project 1016880 and the National Science Foundation under award DEB-1931232. M.P. was funded through BBSRC Global Challenges research grant no. BB/S014586/1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN, USA

    Forrest Fleischman & Claudia Rodriguez Solorzano

  2. Department of Political Science, Florida State University, Tallahasee, FL, USA

    Eric Coleman

  3. Department of Urban & Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden

    Harry Fischer

  4. Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Prakash Kashwan

  5. School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK

    Marion Pfeifer

  6. Kangra Integrated Sciences and Adaptation Network, Centre for Ecology, Development and Research, Dehradun, India

    Vijay Ramprasad

  7. Department of Environmental Studies, Ashoka University, Sonipat, India

    Vijay Ramprasad

  8. Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Joseph W. Veldman

Authors
  1. Forrest Fleischman
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  7. Claudia Rodriguez Solorzano
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All authors conceptualized the work and contributed to writing the manuscript. F.F. led the writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Forrest Fleischman.

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Fleischman, F., Coleman, E., Fischer, H. et al. Restoration prioritization must be informed by marginalized people. Nature 607, E5–E6 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04733-x

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