Over the past 50 years, ecological restoration – the deliberate act of repairing degraded lands and waters – has proven to be an indispensable and highly successful land management tool.
The practice of restoration has resuscitated the Everglades, returned shad and herring to the rivers of Maine, stemmed coastal erosion along the Gulf, and reintroduced more natural (and less destructive) wildfire rhythms to countless western forests.
Thousands of restoration projects have now been implemented, monitored, and evaluated, benefiting nearly every community and county across the country. These projects have been so successful – from an ecological, economic, and societal standpoint – that there is now broad agreement across geographic and political divides on the need to expand and accelerate ecological restoration work of all kinds: from invasive species removal and abandoned mine cleanups to the rebuilding of wetlands.
A big question we face, however, is this: how do we scale up ecological restoration efforts to meet the need and to harness the opportunities they present?
The typical (and easy) answer to this question is: more funding. And it is true. More money – whether from public, private, or philanthropic investment – enables more marshes to be replanted, more habitat to be reconnected, and more forests to be returned to health.
But the lessons learned from implementing recent federal legislation teach us that investments alone can’t unlock the full potential of restoration in the U.S.: we also need deep and fundamental reforms to how land management agencies prioritize, plan, and implement restoration projects.
Restoration work is needed to sustain tribal cultural practices and traditional land uses; to deliver clean drinking water for millions of people; and to reduce smoke and other air pollution that children are breathing.
In this essay, I outline five strategies that land management agencies can adopt to accelerate ecological restoration, to make dollars go farther, and to deliver lasting and meaningful benefits to human and natural communities.
These strategies and reforms face significant barriers: bureaucratic change can be painstakingly slow, silos are difficult to dismantle, and staffing and budget cuts have undermined some of the progress made in recent years. But to bring more of America’s lands, waters, and wildlife to health and vibrancy, we must continue the hard but important work of changing how federal restoration work is done.
Federal Restoration Challenges and Opportunities
Federal agencies manage roughly 640 million acres of lands, or roughly one-third of the U.S. landmass. A significant portion is degraded due to historic land use, climate impacts, and ongoing human pressures.
Consider the 240 million acres that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees. According to BLM’s 2024 report A Critical Call to Restore Our Public Lands and the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Evaluating Trends in Rangeland Health on Bureau of Land Management Lands, 2024 report:
- 80 million acres of BLM public lands would benefit from prescribed fire to reduce catastrophic wildfire risk.
- Of the 155 million acres of BLM-managed rangelands, 56 million acres (one-third) are in poor condition.
- Prior to recent budget cuts, only 12% of BLM’s budget was dedicated to restoration.
Other federal land management agencies are grappling with their own land health problems. The U.S. Forest Service is struggling to bring the forests it manages back into balance, after a century of fire suppression and industrial-scale logging. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is combating invasive species that are degrading and imperiling the habitat of native species. The National Park Service is grappling with the growing impacts of climate change on the natural and cultural resources it stewards. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is trying to save and recover the country’s remaining coral reefs – hotspots for marine biodiversity.
Investments alone can’t unlock the full potential of restoration: we also need deep and fundamental reforms to how land management agencies prioritize, plan, and implement restoration projects.
Across America’s public lands and waters, restoration opportunities abound – and not merely for the benefit of nature. Restoration work is needed to sustain tribal cultural practices and traditional land uses; to deliver clean drinking water for hundreds of millions of people; and to reduce smoke and other air pollution that children are breathing.
Because ecological restoration work on public lands and waters is so critical to so many people, Congress in recent years has been willing to make some remarkable investments to bring forests, rivers, and wildlife back to health.
The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Demonstrated What’s Possible
In 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) – known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – with support from both Republicans and Democrats.
The law made landmark investments in roads, bridges, airports and other human-made infrastructure. But, unbeknownst to many people, it also made unprecedented investments in natural infrastructure.
The Department of Agriculture scaled up hazardous fuels reduction in the national forests. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration worked with other agencies to improve fish passage in streams, rivers, and estuaries.
And the IIJA injected $1.4 billion into ecological restoration work through the Department of the Interior (DOI), where I worked, primarily for the benefit of public lands.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act showed that when agencies coordinate, restoration outcomes improve. The question now is how to institutionalize that progress and build back from a much hollowed out federal work force.
At DOI, the scale of the IIJA investments spurred remarkable changes in how agencies approached restoration work. Notably, agencies collaborated in ways they hadn’t before (and, in light of recent staffing and budget reductions, are no longer able to do). A 2026 independent assessment concluded that IIJA restoration investments “provide a rich base of lessons learned and assets that could be applied to potential future cross-departmental ecosystem restoration or related initiatives.” (BIL Ecosystem Restoration Program Assessment Report, NuvoSum LLC)
The IIJA showed that when agencies coordinate, restoration outcomes improve. The question now is how to institutionalize that progress and build back from a much hollowed out federal work force.
Strategies to Strengthen and Scale Ecological Restoration
The following five recommendations draw from IIJA implementation experience. They also align with findings from a remarkable report from the BLM in 2024 – called the Restoration Blueprint – which aimed to capture some of the lessons learned from its experience in implementing the IIJA and congressional restoration directives.
1. Adopt Best-in-Class, Process-Based Restoration Standards
Federal agencies should align with SER’s International Principles and Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration. Doing so requires establishing a shared community of practice across agencies and potentially creating a centralized coordinating function, either within the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) at the White House or through a Secretarial Coordinating Committee composed of senior leaders from restoration-focused federal agencies.
2. Prioritize Landscape-Level Planning
Federal agencies and partners, including the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, have developed sophisticated GIS-based planning tools such as USFWS’s data-driven Conservation Blueprint. These tools identify priority habitats, wildlife corridors, and ecoregional needs.
However, they are often used in isolation. Better synthesizing these tools and using them to guide restoration decisions would shift agencies away from a distributed, project-by-project model (“random acts of conservation”) toward strategic, landscape-scale interventions.
Applying a tiered, scientifically rigorous prioritization framework that references the best conservation planning tools could be adopted. The key is to set restoration targets that are durable and take into consideration the “new normal”, meaning historical reference conditions are no longer viable in a shifting climate.
3. Coordinate (Not Consolidate) Funding Streams
Restoration funding is scattered across numerous federal programs at DOI, USDA, and NOAA. Instead of consolidating these programs, a central entity such as CEQ could better coordinate them, especially as the White House controls the purse strings.
This means ensuring that all restoration-related funding, whether direct appropriations or pass-through grants, follows the same core principles:
- Investments should be guided by landscape-level planning rather than isolated project selection.
- Projects should adhere to process-based ecological restoration standards.
- Common restoration standards and principles should be applied to both public and private lands subject to public funding.
- Funding entities should consult a cross-agency oversight body to align priorities and maximize impact. (See 1 above.)
This approach would significantly amplify the effectiveness of existing dollars without requiring major new appropriations. In addition, innovative conservation finance tools should be explored and implemented such as revolving funds, pay-for-performance contracts, and blended public-private financing to expand the pool of restoration funds and to rely less on taxpayer or user-fee funded grants.
4. Strengthen Adaptive Management Through Monitoring and Reporting
Monitoring is essential for learning and accountability. A 2024 workshop at the Denver Federal Center convened restoration professionals to develop a cross-bureau framework with shared goals, indicators, and measures for assessing restoration outcomes at landscape scales. The workshop recommended that the United States Geologic Survey work with other DOI bureaus to ensure the framework is transferable across geographies and supports “consistent and coordinated evaluation of restoration outcomes and provides insight into restoration successes and failures.”
This effort should be revived and aligned with similar initiatives in USDA and the Department of Commerce. Applying monitoring standards is both a technical and a cultural challenge as staff across all agencies need to be “bought in” for standards to be properly implemented and used for adaptive management purposes.
5. Strengthen Critical Support Systems
Successful restoration requires reliable inputs and infrastructure. This includes a robust supply of native seeds, supported by a strengthened National Interagency Seed and Restoration Center; strong interagency coordination models such as the Federal Interagency Fish Passage Task Force; an equitable, qualified vendor program to ensure contractors meet process-based standards; certification and training for federal restoration practitioners; greatly expanded support for indigenous led conservation, especially the use of co-stewardship agreements, and streamlined permitting and contracting for projects that meet ecological restoration criteria.
Meaningful scale can be achieved through smarter policy, better coordination, greater reliance on and authority given to indigenous-led conservation, and a willingness to break down agency silos.
Bottom Line: Scaling Restoration Requires Coordination, Not Just Funding
Achieving ecological restoration at scale is not simply a matter of increasing budgets. While additional funding is valuable, meaningful scale can be achieved through smarter policy, better coordination, greater reliance on and authority given to indigenous-led conservation, and a willingness to break down agency silos.
Investing in America’s lands and waters is an investment in national well-being. The restoration economy already generates $9.6 billion annually and supports more than 53,000 jobs.
With a more unified, strategic approach, these economic benefits and the ecological, cultural, and tribal benefits that accompany them could grow substantially. Ecological restoration is not only an environmental necessity; it is a pathway to a healthier, more resilient, and more prosperous nation.
