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Abstract

Restoration has gained traction as a Natural Climate Solution that can also benefit local communities and biodiversity. Most areas with high restoration potential are located in the tropics, to exploit the fast tree growth, and to harness the dense presence of people on rural lands —many of them small-scale farmers who potentially benefit from restoration in multiple ways. Understanding how restoration interventions can benefit these farmers while attaining other important goals is critical for the design of just, equitable and long-lasting interventions. This dissertation examines Sembrando Vida, a restoration program in Mexico that pays farmers to restore their land through agroforestry. I applied quantitative methods to census, remote sensing and government data to compare what policymakers designed for the Sembrando Vida program with what was finally implemented, and to understand the program’s impact on tree cover. In Chapter 2 —the first published analysis of Sembrando Vida at the national scale— I show that the reduction of poverty and of forest cover loss are the most likely outcomes of the program, while areas of importance for biodiversity were the least favored by the final distribution of beneficiaries. Chapter 3 demonstrates how different definitions of “small-scale farm” shape our understanding of the rural landscape using the first national-scale maps of small farms in the peer-reviewed literature. I show that the number, distribution, and average characteristics of small farms vary by as much as a factor of three depending on the definition applied, significantly affecting estimates of food production and the spatial targeting of interventions. Chapter 4 is the first environmental assessment of a national policy considering both tree loss and gains annually. I find that the arrival of the program led to a temporary spike in tree removal during the first year of implementation, but significantly reduced tree loss after five years of implementation, highlighting the strong dependence of its impacts on the timeframe of evaluation. These findings offer critical insights for restoration interventions by providing evidence of unavoidable trade-offs, the critical importance of defining the target population, and the complex temporal dynamics arising during implementation of national restoration initiatives.