Restoration prioritization must be informed by marginalized people

The maps and analysis by Strassburg et al.1 should not be used by

policy-makers in their current form, because of the risk of displacing

marginalized people, compromising food security and undermining

democratic processes. Their analysis was based on normative choices to

value (that is, to optimize) relationships among biodiversity potential,

carbon storage potential and cost-effectiveness, without considering

the well-being and rights of people who live in areas identified as

restoration priorities, nor the implementation costs of changing land

use. Although it may be informative to map the joint distribution of

biodiversity, carbon and commodity prices, the absence of important

socioeconomic values obscures both the costs and benefits to

the Indigenous, forest-dependent and rural people who are directly

affected by restoration interventions. We pose three cautionary questions

that we believe must be answered before the maps produced by

Strassburg et al. are used by decision-makers to motivate and implement

restoration-promoting land-use policies.