The perceived ecological and human well‐being benefits of ecosystem restoration

Traditionally, ecosystem restoration has focussed on standard ecological indicators like water or habitat quality, species population abundance or vegetation cover to determine success. However, there is growing interest in how restoration might impact people and communities. For example, researchers have documented positive socio‐ecological links between restoration and human well‐being indicators like property value, natural hazard mitigation, recreation opportunity and happiness. Furthermore, public health benefits from restoration have been linked to public support for programmes. Drawing from this research, the United Nations declared 2021–2030 the ‘Decade of Ecosystem Restoration’ and set a goal to promote more socio‐ecological goals in ecosystem restoration. Nonetheless, there is still a lack of information on the extent to which restoration practitioners consider well‐being because many granting programmes only require ecological goals and monitoring. To explore how restoration practitioners design, implement and measure the success of their projects, we used the federally funded Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) as a case study. Since 2010, GLRI has awarded over $3.5 Billion to over 5300 projects across the midwestern United States, but it does not presently require human well‐being considerations. We performed an online survey targeting project managers with a sample of GLRI projects (N = 1574). We received 437 responses and found that almost half set a human well‐being goal, and more than 70% of those who did believe they reached it. In comparison, 90% of project managers believed they met their ecological goals. These documented perceptions of positive impacts for both people and nature suggest that restoration may already transcend traditional indicators and monitoring for socio‐ecological metrics could capture many ‘unseen’ benefits. Therefore, we recommend that ecosystem restoration programmes adopt a socio‐ecological lens to document the full extent of their restoration outcomes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.