Water funds are task-specific organisations that conserve and restore watersheds. While implementing conservation and restoration efforts at the local level, these groups encounter scale challenges, consisting of mismatches between the ecological and the governance scale and misalignment between governance levels. This study's aim is to identify and unravel both the scale challenges with which two Ecuadorian water funds (FONAG and FORAGUA) were confronted and the scale-sensitive governance strategies that they planned and deployed to overcome them.

Understanding existing public policies for restoration is very labor-intensive. To address this, we developed a semiautomated policy analysis tool that uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to mine policy documents, assist the labeling process carried out by policy experts, automatically identify policies that contain incentives and classify them by incentive instrument.

Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) face a substantial investment gap in their work to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement. This paper discusses how nature-based solutions present the IDB with an opportunity to maximize the impact of finance leveraged towards these goals in a way that prioritizes social inclusion and environmental sustainability.

A number of conservation policies have been implemented to protect tropical montane cloud forests (TMCF), but many impact assessment models are targeted towards temperate zones. This study uses local evapotranspiration and streamflow datasets to calibrate and validate an improved version of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool model for the Tropics (SWAT-T).

In the last quarter of 2020, the Costa Rican Ministry for the Environment and Energy (MINAE) announced the signing of two major agreements, the last of the country's first-generation Payment for Environmental Services (PES) programs. This paper syntheses government pledges, interviews, and the authors’ experience working with the first generation of PES, and presents initial recommendations to increase the effectiveness and impact of PES 2.0.

Who decides what kind of transformation is needed, of what, and for whom? What principles guide those decisions, and how are decision-makers held accountable? This commentary article argues that these governance questions are central in any solution in order to simultaneously address the planetary crises of forest and biodiversity loss and degradation and growing inequality.

This publication outlines a set of ten principles for achieving long-lasting, resilient, and equitable ecosystem restoration. These principles are guided by political ecology, a framework that addresses environmental concerns from a broadly political economic perspective, attending to power, politics, and equity within specific geographic and historical contexts. Drawing on the chain of explanation, this multi-scale, cross-landscapes Playbook aims to produce healthy relationships between people and nature that are ecologically, socially, and economically just – and thus sustainable and resilient – while recognizing the political nature of such relationships.

A successful process to advance forest landscape restoration (FLR) needs to motivate, enable and resource its implementation. This brief offers a preliminary exploratory analysis of some of the range of policies that respond to each of these three requirements. 

This study identifies key factors related to the success and impact of ICMs for FLR and presents elements that should be considered when developing new or assessing current ICMs.

Many governments have developed robust plans and strategies to prioritize areas for restoration under multiple environmental, social and economic objectives. But once these processes are finished, restoration often stalls. Why?