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.
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.”
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.
