Consensus is growing among stakeholders that the mitigation of the most relevant global environmental problems of our time will require restoring forests across vast extents of agricultural and abandoned lands. A myriad of international organizations, multilateral agencies, countries and NGOs are promoting and committing to forest restoration initiatives globally to reach national and international targets, such as the Aichi Target 15, Bonn Challenge and the New York Declaration (Laestadius et al., 2011). Science-based principles (Suding et al., 2015), a policy-driven agenda (Chazdon et al., 2017), and emergent constraints (Menz, Dixon, & Hobbs, 2013) for large-scale forest restoration have already been proposed. However, few solutions have been proposed to address a major challenge for achieving global restoration commitments: making it financially viable for government and other project leaders (Brancalion & van Melis, 2017).

A landscape-approach for planning and implementing cost-effective restoration is needed to balance restoration costs and outcomes (i.e. cost-effectiveness analysis) (Birch et al., 2010; Sayer et al., 2013). This approach relies on the investigation and modelling of biophysical and socio-economic costs and benefits of forest restoration in targeted landscapes, using scenarios, to reveal the impacts of implementing different restoration approaches and investment strategies (Metzger et al., 2017). Within a particular climatic region, restoration cost on private lands is mostly determined by costs of implementation and maintenance and land opportunity costs, which vary according to existing and prior land use, landscape features, and market contexts. Implementation and maintenance costs are directly associated with the levels of human interventions required to initiate the long-term process of forest restoration, with natural regeneration being the lowest-cost alternative for large-scale restoration (Chazdon & Guariguata, 2016; Holl & Aide, 2011).