There are around 60,000 known tree species in the world, and they can do amazing things: store carbon, provide people with food and firewood, shelter creatures big and small, and so much more. In the past two decades, numerous high-profile initiatives have announced ambitious restoration targets for forests. Restoring forests can bring all kinds of benefits and is widely seen as an effective nature-based solution to climate change and biodiversity loss. But planting the wrong trees, or planting them in the wrong places, is, at best, a missed opportunity — and at worst, can even harm biodiversity. In fact, a 2019 Nature commentary found that almost half the area pledged under the Bonn Challenge, a high-profile initiative to restore 350 million hectares (865 million acres) of degraded forest by 2030, was for plantation-style monocultures, and thus a poor strategy for both carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Meanwhile, half of the land pledged for reforestation under the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative was actually on savanna, a landscape not suitable for tree planting, according to a 2024 Science study. “It started to occur to us that there was potentially a problem here, particularly given the size of the pledges that were being made,” says Paul Smith, secretary-general at U.K.-based charity Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). What was needed, Smith and colleagues thought, was some way to promote best practices and recognize projects that got things right. When they looked at existing certification standards, they found that none focused primarily on biodiversity. What’s…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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