From tree loss to climate gains: Rethinking carbon flows, payoffs, and trade-offs of forest landscape restoration

Forest landscape restoration (FLR) can fight climate change, but timing matters. We compared fully active planting strategy (s-FLR) with a hybrid restoration strategy (c-FLR) combining planting and natural regeneration in the Castelporziano case study, Italy. Over 50 years, a site-specific static and dynamic Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tracked net carbon balance and radiative forcing. Life cycle emissions reached 15.5 Mg CO₂-eq ha^-1 for s-FLR and 12.1 Mg CO₂-eq ha^-1 for c-FLR. By 2075, s-FLR sequestered 49.3 Mg CO₂-eq ha^-1 and 79.5 Mg CO₂-eq ha^-1 for c-FLR. In relative terms, c-FLR offset 6.6 times its emissions, compared to 3.2 times for s-FLR. Although covering just one-fifth of the area, the passive component contributed more than half of the total C sequestration capacity of c-FLR. However, active planting remains crucial to steer succession and restore landscape identity, ensuring ecological memory is restored within a practical timeframe. Dynamic analysis revealed a stark contrast. While s-FLR warmed the climate for over a decade, c-FLR produced immediate cooling effects and climate benefits. These findings confirm how hybrid restoration strategies combine rapid climate mitigation with enhanced biodiversity and ecosystem resilience. Moreover, static metrics in C accounting can mislead climate policy. Dynamic, site-specific LCA emerges as a practical tool for optimizing restoration strategies across time and space. By capturing both the magnitude and timing of climate benefits, our results show how dynamic, site-specific assessment can inform policy and guide investments toward restoration strategies that are climate-smart, cost-effective, and ecologically intentional.