RESCAPE

Realizing landscape restoration: Enabling transformative change of land-use  

Habitat destruction and land-use pressure causing unprecedented pressure on nature and species globally. This call for a transformative change in the use the land. A massive upscaling of ecosystem restoration is needed. RESCAPE will establish a framework for how landscape restoration can be realized through transformative change of land-use, and develop tools for prioritization (where), best-practice (how) and communication (what) for upscaling landscape restoration.

Ecosystem restoration contributes to the protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services, mitigate carbon emissions, and secure the livelihood of people. The UN member states have declared the Decade for Ecosystem Restoration (2021 – 2030) to realize the benefits of restoration towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Norway has committed to the 15% target (CBD 2010) through the White Paper “Natur for livet”. Norway has recently joined the COP#15 (CBD 2022) stating that 30% of degraded land will be under restoration by 2050.

At present the restoration rate in Norway is low, and the annual level of land degradation is still much higher that the restoration. How to turn this trend?

Large scale landscape restoration is challenging. How to accomplish upscaling from single, small-scale restoration projects to large-scale landscape management under land-use pressure? How is the interaction between nature, society and actors under diverging interests? 

• RESCAPE will deliver a framework for landscape restoration as an integrated part of future land-use in Norway 

• RESCAPE will use data from previous and ongoing restoration to idetify drivers and barriers for future restoration, and in dialogue with local users, explore the potential for restoration in landscapes. 

• RESCAPE will contribute to understand the connections between ecology, society, politics and economy in restoration projects, and how to upscale into a landscape perspective 

• Contributions from RESCAPE will be to develop spatially explicit tools to prioritize sites for restoration (where to restore), and hands-on planning tools for active restoration and decision making (what and how to restore). 

The Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) is Norway’s leading institution for applied ecological research, including ecosystem restoration. 

RESCAPE will further straighten NINA’s multidiciplinarity in restoration research and deliver valuable knowledge to society. RESCAPE will take the broad and transdisciplinary approach needed to prepare the ground for future large scale ecosystem restoration in Norway and show how this is integral to a wider transformative change of land management needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).