The United Nations declared 2021-2030 the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.” Restoration is no longer merely an ecological effort, but strives to contribute to human well-being, combat biodiversity loss, and reverse environmental degradation. However, three well-known challenges are commonly neglected in the design of restoration areas: climate change, resource overexploitation, and political instability. Globally, locations predicted to be disproportionally affected by these three threats coincide with locations earmarked for ambitious restoration activities.

In their recent article, Frietsch et al. (2023) outline the impacts of climate change, resource overexploitation and political instability on restoration areas, synthesize key principles for restoration and resilience from existing literature and introduce a two-step approach detailing how the resulting three guiding themes can be applied to restoration sites.

Climate change challenges ecosystem restoration because it shapes the future of the ecosystem in an unpredictable manner. Interestingly, climate change is expected to have an above-average impact on the…