The response of geographical processes to landscape restoration: China’s research progress

Abstract

The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) provides a new momentum for scaling up ecosystem restoration efforts to landscape restoration. China’s recent experience with transformative investment in landscape restoration provides invaluable guidance for the world. We retrospectively reviewed the scientific evidence on the responses of physical, ecological, and social processes to China’s landscape restoration under geographic heterogeneity and obtained four experiences and lessons. First, China’s forest landscape restoration has successfully promoted vegetation growth and enlarged the carbon sink. Second, landscape restoration has reduced the local water yield, while the regional responses of rainfall are still not clear. Third, the local conditions of soil erosion and habitat quality were largely improved by landscape restoration, while the decreases in soil moisture and streamflow demonstrated significant trade-offs among ecosystem services. Last, geographical differentiation existed in the local responses of livelihoods to landscape restoration strategies, and the win‒win solutions between human development and nature improvement under different landscape contexts were still uncertain. We summarize three additional questions as future prospects: what is the scale of the thresholds to prevent overshoot and cascading negative ecological effects? what are people’s prior needs from nature? considering that there may be no universal win‒win pathways, how to promote co-benefits based on regional human–nature relationships?