Reimagining Forest Restoration and Protection: Dismantling Extractive Approaches while Building Just Community-Led Forest Solutions
WECAN’s report, Reimagining Forest Restoration and Protection: Dismantling Extractive Approaches while Building Just Community-Led Forest Solutions, examines key pathways to protect and steward the world’s forests. The report outlines forest governance and policy gaps that must be addressed to curb accelerating forest loss and bring about effective and equitable forest protection and restoration. Halting and reversing deforestation will require sustained political will and coordinated action by governments and other stakeholders to transform forest finance, governance, and management systems.
The report delineates the structural barriers to forest protection that perpetuate extractive market-based conservation models, which financialize forests and prioritize investors and profits over people and the planet. To move beyond these barriers, the report identifies seven critical approaches for policy-makers, governments, and other actors to embrace and enact including, 1) strengthening the rights and decision-making power of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and other forest communities; 2) meaningfully involving women in all of their diversity and adopting gender-responsive frameworks; 3) moving from loans to reparative long-term flexible grants; 4) restructuring and cancelling sovereign debt that constraints funds available for forest protection; 5) halting perverse incentives and regulating deforestation-linked activities in partnership with affected countries and communities; 6) adopting Rights of Nature and Beyond Growth policies and principles; and 7) fostering solidarity among peoples and communities to fight for forests. The report also highlights examples of community-led forest solutions that demonstrate a path forward to effectively protect global forests within gender-just and ecocentric frameworks. When considered across tens of thousands of regional and local projects, these efforts make clear that achieving zero deforestation is possible when community-led projects, particularly those stewarded by women, receive sufficient funding, technical, institutional, and other support.
