Introduction: Restoring lowland rain forests in Indonesia.

Degraded and secondary tropical forests supply a diversity of ecosystem services and their value for biodiversity conservation is increasingly recognised. Moreover, restoration of such forests can enhance ecosystem service provisioning and their value to conservation [1]. However, degraded forests are vulnerable to deforestation through conversion to plantations or small holder encroachment because, as a consequence their depleted resources, their capacity to generate income is limited. Nowhere is this problem more evident than in Indonesia, which has approximately 25 million hectares of exhausted former logging concessions without current management [2] and some of the highest deforestation rates globally [3].The Bonn Challenge, from the Partnership on Forest & Landscape Restoration, set a target of restoring 150 million hectares of degraded land globally by 2020, a target that was recently extended to 350 million hectares by 2030. Moreover, under the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD)'s Aichi Target 15, nations have committed to restoring at least 15% of degraded ecosystems, or approximately 300 million hectares, by 2020 [4]. While highly laudable, these international commitments are unlikely to make significant headway unless much more is done by the international community to address the ultimate drivers of ecosystem degradation, namely human population growth and unsustainable agricultural intensification.

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1177/194008291500800102

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