High monitoring costs seen hindering nature restoration efforts in Latin America

Published 11:33 on May 7, 2024  /  Last updated at 11:33 on May 7, 2024  / Giada Ferraglioni /  Americas, Biodiversity, South & Central

Nature restoration practices across Latin America lack effective tools to quantify their outcomes due to prohibitive monitoring costs, which hamper the long-term success of the projects, a study has revealed.

Nature restoration practices across Latin America lack effective tools to quantify their outcomes due to prohibitive monitoring costs, which hamper the long-term success of the projects, a study has revealed.

In an analysis published in the journal Biological Conservation, researchers from ETH Zurich surveyed 166 restoration practitioners across 14 countries to report on their motivations, methods, and costs.

While practices varied across Latin America, with active tree planting remaining the most frequently used intervention (81,6%), a key common factor was a mismatch between project goals and assessment.

Although the top goal of most projects was to conserve biodiversity (87.2%), nature recovery was not often measured – which keeps practitioners from tracking progress and making effective adaptive management decisions.

“Promisingly, we found that almost all practitioners implement a wide range of restoration intervention types, appearing to match interventions with the scale of individual projects,” the study said.

“However, the indicators used to monitor restoration often did not align with the overarching motivations for restoration actions.”

As researchers found, the vast majority of monitoring in those restoration projects focused on tree planting metrics – such as number of trees planted, seedling survival, and growth.

The data are usually collected to satisfy funding requirements and are measured for the first 2-5 years of projects.

However, despite recovery being the top motivation for restoration, efforts to quantify biodiversity uplifts were not as common among practitioners due to the prohibitive costs of monitoring.

“Only a few types of technology were frequently mentioned, including remote sensing and camera trapping, suggesting that technologies for monitoring are not yet being widely used,” the study said.

In the past few years, several tech and intelligence firms developed innovative methods for monitoring nature more efficiently. Yet, many barriers to digitalisation still exist, and their costs remain an obstacle for many management programmes, especially in developing countries, as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently underlined,

According to the researchers from ETH Zurich, low-cost technologies that can support the monitoring of biodiversity are rapidly emerging and becoming more accessible, such as cellphone apps and acoustic recording devices that use deep machine learning to identify images of plants and animals or identify species from a particular sound.

“Our results emphasise that, while a promising range of new forest restoration interventions are being implemented across Latin America, lower cost interventions, accessible and practical monitoring strategies, and better alignment between funding cycles and actual time frames required to achieve restoration objectives are urgently needed to support successful outcomes,” the study said.

Last month, a survey by the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) showed that many non-EU countries still lack resources to produce the biodiversity indicators required under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

According to their analysis, most non-EU states pointed to a shortage in funding, stressing that more resources are needed to produce the indicators within the next five years.

By Giada Ferraglioni – giada@carbon-pulse.com

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