Assessing multidimensional resilience in terrestrial ecosystem restoration projects with the IRET-SICA framework

Abstract Resilience has emerged as a key goal in ecosystem conservation and restoration; however, assessing it remains methodologically difficult because current approaches frequently privilege environmental outcomes and provide limited integration of social and economic dimensions. Comparative evidence is particularly scarce for climate-vulnerable regions such as the countries of the Central American Integration System (SICA). This study therefore examines how resilience can be operationalized and comparatively assessed in terrestrial ecosystem conservation and restoration projects through a multidimensional composite index. To address this gap, the study develops and applies the Terrestrial Ecosystem Resilience Index for the Central American Integration System (IRET-SICA), structured around three interrelated dimensions: environmental, social, and economic, operationalized through 19 indicators. The index was applied to a sample of 40 projects implemented across SICA member countries. The results show that resilience-related practices are more consistently incorporated within the environmental dimension, whereas the social and, especially, economic components display lower and more uneven levels of integration. The economic dimension presents the greatest variation across projects and constitutes the main source of regional differentiation. Although most projects were classified in the study’s medium-resilience category, the findings indicate that resilience is generally incorporated through selective rather than fully integrated, multidimensional configurations. Beyond measuring resilience performance, the IRET-SICA provides analytical insight into how environmental, social, and economic dimensions interact within ecosystem restoration projects, revealing structural imbalances that remain largely overlooked by predominantly environmental assessment frameworks. By enabling systematic comparison across projects and national contexts, the proposed index advances the operationalization of resilience as a multidimensional construct and offers a replicable framework for supporting project evaluation, adaptive management, and evidence-based environmental policymaking in highly climate-vulnerable regions.