Aligning with the “4 Returns Framework” enhances stakeholder engagement by fostering landscape-level partnerships and collaborative planning efforts. By embracing this approach, restoration initiatives become more than just ecological endeavours: they become catalysts for social, economic, and inspirational returns. Through a shared understanding of the landscape's challenges and opportunities, stakeholders co-create a vision for restoration, ensuring that projects are aligned with broader landscape goals. Moreover, the framework's emphasis on monitoring and learning enables adaptive management, allowing restoration plans to evolve in response to changing conditions and stakeholder feedback. This iterative process fosters greater stakeholder buy-in and long- term commitment to restoration efforts, ultimately enhancing project sustainability and success (Sterling et al. , 2017; Dudley et al. , 2021).
4 Returns Framework
The 4 Returns Framework is an approach for evaluating restoration feasibility at landscape scales (e.g. >100,000 ha) and for assessing how smaller projects fit within and contribute to the wider landscape. This conceptual and practical framework helps stakeholders to achieve returns in four areas – social returns, natural returns, financial returns, and inspirational returns. The framework follows five process elements:
1. Landscape partnership 2. Shared system understanding 3. Landscape vision and collaborative planning 4. Taking action 5. Monitoring and learning.
The elements are implemented within a multifunctional landscape (including natural zones, economic zones, and combined zones) over realistic time periods (indicative: minimum 20 years). Multiple restoration projects across several ecosystem types must go through an alignment and planning process that may take up to 2 years.
4. Set SMART targets: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Time-bound
When setting targets for restoring habitats, it is necessary to take an approach focused on reinstating ecological functions rather than concentrating on delivering individual attributes (Atkinson et al. , 2001) or actions. In the field of restoration ecology, a crucial distinction is made between (real) ecological targets and management actions. The former pertains to the overarching goal of restoring an ecological function, such as transforming a degraded tidal flat into a thriving foraging habitat for waterbirds. On the other hand, the latter involves specific management actions, like removing invasive cordgrass Spartina , managing native vegetation, repositioning sediment, etc., which should be regarded as means to achieve the ecological target rather than targets themselves (Bakker et al. , 2000).
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