Evaluation of restoration response effectiveness

Assessing the success or failure of any intervention or response to land degradation is essential to upscale the intervention, if successful, or to correct it, if it needs improvement. It saves money and time and guide us towards success. For this evaluation of restoration responses for their effectiveness is required. The response effectiveness can be assessed from multiple perspectives (economic, social, environmental, cultural, technical, and political), depending on the goals of intervention/response (see sections 6.1 & 6.2.2).

A range of indirect (enabling and instrumental) and direct (biophysical and technical) responses have been used to address land degradation drivers and processes with varying degrees of success (or failure) for different forms of land degradation (see sections 6.3 and 6.4). Restoration intervention/responses are context-specific to the degradation drivers (e.g. agricultural expansion, urbanisation) and processes.

In the existing practice, we find some evidence of assessment of response effectiveness but not widely for different land use types (see sections 6.3.1, table 6.6) and degradation drivers/processes (see section 6.3.2 and table 6.7). Also the effectiveness are often evaluated from singular perspective – most often environmental one. In the context of avoiding, reducing and reversing land degradation of various types, we need baseline indicators of different types, depending on the nature of response that can collectively provide a holistic view of the effectiveness of the restoration responses, which appears to be an important gap.  In relation to this, examining following questions is useful while considering how to evaluate response effectiveness:

• How do we know whether restoration responses/intervention worked or not?
• How do we know such responses are effective or not from different considerations: economic, social, environmental, cultural, technical, and political?
• Do we need to consider all forms of considerations in evaluating the effectiveness of responses?
• Do we need to consider them even when selecting the responses or only when evaluating the responses?
• Responses may be effective in some and not in other dimensions, how do we assess their effectiveness?
• Should the response effectiveness be focussed only on triple bottom-line: economic, environmental, social

Ram Pandit