- The Society for Ecological Restoration released the third edition of its global restoration standards on June 23, shifting the emphasis from doing no harm to actively driving ecological “uplift” and recovery in line with the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s goal of restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030.
- A central feature is the refined “Five-star System,” complemented by the “Restorative Continuum,” tools that measure restoration progress both ecologically and socially.
- The standards make an explicit “business case” for restoration, framing it as a way to redirect environmentally harmful subsidies toward investments that benefit both biodiversity and economic livelihoods, giving companies and funders a trusted roadmap for action.
- Experts emphasized that integrating local and Indigenous ecological knowledge alongside science is essential to credible restoration, with one researcher calling for greater involvement from Global South practitioners in shaping future iterations of the standards.
The Society for Ecological Restoration, a U.S.-based conservation organization, published an updated set of standards and principles for restoring ecosystems on June 23, the third edition of the volume since 2016.
Back then, the idea was to develop a way of thinking about and carrying out restoration that avoided some of the damage caused by projects focused on a narrowly defined target, says lead author George Gann. For example, enhancing carbon storage in forests could lead to monoculture tree plantations instead of productive habitats for biodiversity-rich ecosystems.
The 2026 version of the manual also asserts do-no-harm principles and the importance of conserving native ecosystems, just as the first did in 2016. “But now we have to do more,” says Gann, international policy lead at the Society for Ecological Restoration. “We can’t just avoid collateral damage. We have to actually create recovery. We have to create “uplift” for biodiversity.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, sets the goal of restoring 30% of all degraded ecosystems by 2030, and the United Nations has tagged 2021-2030 the “decade on restoration.” The standards and principles are specific, providing a set of tools for designing, implementing, and monitoring restoration work. At the same time, they’re “generic,” the authors note, allowing their application across diverse ecosystems facing different pathways to restoration.
“These standards don’t tell you how to restore grasslands or mangroves,” Gann says. “They’re not intended for that … you still have to have the local knowledge. You still have to understand the ecosystem that you’re working in.”
He says the standards are intended to be a living document, useful for a wide range of people involved in restoration. That group includes policymakers, civil society and business leaders, he adds.
‘Five-star’ restoration
Central to this update is a refined version of what the authors call the “Five-star System.” The tool aims to help measure the progress of restoration efforts, ecologically — but also socially, in the ways that they benefit communities. The authors are careful to clarify that the number of stars doesn’t equate to an evaluation of a project, nor will every project reach the five-star rating — that is, a point at which nearly all of the drivers of degradation are gone. Fully restoring a native ecosystem might not be possible in all situations.
Kripal Singh, a professor and plant and soil ecologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais who was not involved in writing the standards, applauds the “improved focus” of the five-star system and the related frameworks in the updated version.
“Every restoration project has some level of success across proposed attributes,” Singh tells Mongabay in an email. “Recovery frameworks can help in assessing and highlighting partial recovery, recovery gaps, and possible adjustments.”
Emphasizing the importance of the process is critical in communicating the importance of restoration to policymakers, funders, business leaders and other partners, the authors say. Tools like the Five-star System and the related “Restorative Continuum,” which plots out the spans of different restoration activities and how they can contribute to different goals, help convey what’s possible.
“It really highlights that ecological restoration is just one of the activities that can be done to help to recover biodiversity,” says co-author of the standards David Bartholomew, CEO of the Global Biodiversity Standard, a nature-based solution certifying organization. “There’s actions that can happen beyond ecological restoration.”
He adds that rehabilitation — of a severely degraded forest, for example — can have important benefits even if it doesn’t reach full recovery.
Gann says that the aim is to have restoration and economic benefits.
“We want to restore native ecosystems, and we need to do this at scale,” he adds. “But we also need to eat. We need to provide an economy for people to live.”
‘The business case’
Bartholomew says the updated standards put forth “the business case” for restoration.
That’s led to key questions about how the standards can provide a “roadmap” for safe investment for companies and philanthropies, while also achieving the goals of restoring ecosystems and boosting biodiversity.
The authors note the importance of nature to the global economy, and as a result, that restoration can directly benefit bottom lines.
“Businesses play a unique role in contributing to ecological restoration, but they need trusted and robust international standards to act and invest at scale and speed,” says Eva Zabey, the CEO of Switzerland-based Business for Nature, in an email to Mongabay. Business for Nature is a coalition of conservation and business organizations aiming to develop a “nature-positive economy.”
“These standards provide the foundation on which policy signals can be built to truly shift global markets and level the playing field,” Zabey adds.
For example, she says, the trillions of dollars of public money currently subsidizing harm to the environment — through fossil fuel extraction or the unsustainable use of forests — could be alleviated by “tax credits, grants and low-cost financing for restoration,” Zabey adds. “That way, policymakers can ensure that the right path for nature also becomes the resilient choice for business.”
That redirected funding can go to supporting work on the ground, says Anita Diederichsen, a biologist and the global leader on forest landscape restoration with WWF. In turn, the updated standards can increase confidence in what groups like WWF are doing with the urgency required to address climate change and biodiversity.
“The clock is just ticking so much. More and more we need to be more efficient [in] the way that we do restoration,” Diederichsen, who also chairs the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration, tells Mongabay in an interview. “We can deliver better projects, and also we have more credibility [in] what we are doing.”
The standards also highlight the importance of societal and community engagement in restoration, and along with that, the incorporation of local and Indigenous knowledge, together with science, in project work.
“The trick is to elevate that, so that policymakers and people in government agencies recognize that,” Gann says.
Shiekh Marifatul Haq, a researcher at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia, highlights the importance the standards place on working with communities for restoration, which he has seen in his own work.
In 2023, he and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, reporting on the value that traditional ecological knowledge has played in a restoration project in the Dering-Dibru Saikhowa Elephant Corridor in India. Local knowledge of 31 tree species and their uses, as well as the best sites for planting, directly informed the team’s work restoring forests in the corridor. The team used that information to select the species planted because they provided a mix of food for elephants and other wildlife, with those useful to communities for firewood, timber and medicines for people, Haq says. Thirteen percent of the species directly support local livelihoods, he adds.
“Without involvement of local communities, ecological restoration cannot be successful,” says Haq, who was also a restoration ecologist with the NGO Wildlife Trust of India for the project.
Bartholomew says the key is the combination of science and local knowledge.
“You’ve got that scientific basis that’s based on research … and the scientific method,” Bartholomew says. “But also, you’ve got this understanding of what was there in the past from that traditional ecological knowledge.”
Broadening the knowledge base
Kripal Singh says the standards help address critical gaps he’s seen in the restoration work he’s been involved with. One is the chasm between lofty goals and what actually happens on the ground.
“Every country is now setting highly ambitious goals and making commitments to restore degraded ecosystems. If restoration is measured only through area-based targets, countries and companies may prioritize fast, cheap, and visible interventions rather than ecologically, socially and culturally appropriate ones,” he says. “Standards are needed because they define what credible restoration should involve.”
Singh also says that the inclusion of diverse viewpoints in restoration, as the standards point out, is critical.
“[R]estoration is not always practiced using the full range of knowledge already available,” he adds.
In that vein, Singh says he would like to see more involvement from restoration practitioners in the Global South.
“My concern is that global standards become stronger when the people and regions most affected by degradation are not only consulted, but also visibly involved in shaping, testing, adapting, and communicating the standards,” he says. “Stronger Global South participation would improve ecological relevance, increase legitimacy, and create a greater sense of ownership.”
Gann says that finding ways to be more inclusive of all parts of global society is “an active area of work.”
“The idea of ecological restoration is that people are part of nature,” he adds. “People have caused the problem. People can help solve the problem, but only if they’re involved in a meaningful way.”
Banner image: A seed, ready for planting, at a nursery in Cambodia. Image by John Cannon/Mongabay.
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
Citations:
Gann, G. D., McDonald, T., Walder, B., Aronson, J., Nelson, C. R., Hallett, J. G., . . . Dixon, K. W. (2026). International principles and standards for the practice of ecological restoration. Third edition. Restoration Ecology, 34(S2). doi:10.1111/rec.70441
McDonald, T., Gann, G. D., Jonson, J., & Dixon, K. W. (2016). International standards for the practice of ecological restoration – including principles and key concepts. Society for Ecological Restoration. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-7111-1
Singh, K., Byun, C., & Bux, F. (2022). Ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems in India: Science and practices. Ecological Engineering, 182, 106708. doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2022.106708
Haq, S. M., Pieroni, A., Bussmann, R. W., Abd-ElGawad, A. M., & El-Ansary, H. O. (2023). Integrating traditional ecological knowledge into habitat restoration: implications for meeting forest restoration challenges. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 19(1), 33. doi:10.1186/s13002-023-00606-3
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Cite this article
John Cannon (2026). Updated standards make the case for restoration: ‘We have to create uplift’. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-322279
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
