I'm puzzled why @restoreforward thinks this map is useful. It shows nearly the entirety of India as a potential forest and landscape restoration opportunity, https://twitter.com/restoreforward/status/1278014296430182403

Why is it useful to classify the Thar desert as the same kind of restoration opportunity as the forests of central india?

Why is it useful to call the Thar desert a forest restoration opportunity at all? Having spoken to folks at WRI, I've heard them emphasize that this is forest & landscape restoration. But if its not about forests, why include the word?

Many of the places in this landscape that are identified on this map are naturally various kinds of savannas (or deserts).

If the Indo-Gangetic plain is not a forest restoration opportunity, why include millions of hectares of private farmland, much of which is depended on for subsistence crops, as a restoration opportunity?

Of course, all farmland has the potential for agroforestry, and some regions of India have very successful agroforestry programs, but why leave the Indo-Gangetic plain out of this opportunity?

Although there is an emphasis on the importance of land tenure in the accompanying documents, its seems ridiculous to classify forest and landscape restoration opportuniteis without making an effort to differentiate between public and privately owned land.

The restoration opportunities on these different kinds of land require very different kinds of policy interventions.

Finally, I worry about the message this sends to policymakers.

India has decades of experience implementing various kinds of forest restoration initiatives. Many of them have been failures.

A major reason for this is that these initiatives have tended to ignore the on the ground realities of how people use forests.

A satellite view with a few highly collapsed categories does little to resolve this problem.

We need more information about what programs have worked, and what their outcomes have been for forests and people.

I'd like to think that WRI, a widely respected research organization, would invest in solving this information problem, rather than providing highly aggregated numbers that reflect little about what is on the ground.