The International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) has recently launched the publication, Guidelines for Forest Landscape Restoration in the Tropics, to provide guidance on tropical forest restoration and help policy-makers, practitioners and community-based organizations to put forest landscape restoration (FLR) into practice.

Currently, the area of degraded or otherwise modified landscapes in the humid and semihumid tropics is estimated at 930 million hectares and many tropical forest landscapes that were once covered by dense forests are now degraded areas and require urgent restoration.

The release of the Guidelines for Forest Landscape Restoration in the Tropics is then timely as they constitute an international reference document for the development and improvement of national and subnational guidelines on FLR in the tropics.

This publication builds on the ITTO Guidelines for the Restoration, Management and Rehabilitation of Degraded and Secondary Tropical Forests, published in 2002. Those guidelines represented the first international effort to provide overall guidance on tropical forest restoration, and they remain valid today. However, many other guidelines and tools relevant to FLR have since been released and field experiences and research have yielded new information and approaches.

In light of such developments, the Guidelines for Forest Landscape Restoration in the Tropics take a broader landscape view structured around six principles of FLR developed by the Global partnership on forest and landscape restoration. The principles are enriched by 32 guiding elements and, for each of these, by recommended actions to put FLR into effect in the field.

The publication also presents 18 case studies in the tropics—showing how FLR can be achieved and the challenges and opportunities it presents, especially for local people.

For more information and access to the publication click here.