Prioritise assisted natural regeneration and protecting standing forest over transplanting nursery seedlings

Mechanism

The cheapest, most reliable "planting" is often not planting at all. Two related approaches:

• Assisted natural regeneration (ANR) / farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR). Where land was recently forested, living root systems and a seed bank usually remain. Rather than buying, transporting, and transplanting nursery seedlings, you protect and prune regrowth from existing stumps and roots, exclude grazing and fire, and let the native ecosystem rebuild itself — at a fraction of the cost, with species already adapted to the site.
• Protect what still stands. A mature standing forest stores carbon and biodiversity that a newly planted one won't match for decades. Avoiding loss is faster and more certain than recreating it, so conserving intact forest should take priority over replanting cleared land wherever both are options.

Where it fits

ANR suits degraded-but-recoverable land with surviving rootstock and a nearby seed source — common in dryland and agroforestry settings. Protection-first applies anywhere intact or secondary forest remains under threat. Both are strongest where the failure mode being avoided is exactly what kills transplanted seedlings: poor establishment, wrong species, and high aftercare costs.

Limits

• Much lower cost per hectare, and surviving plants are by definition site-adapted.
• Not universal. Severely degraded land with no rootstock or seed bank, or sites needing specific species, may still require planting.
• Produces no dramatic planting-day count, which is why it is under-funded relative to mass-planting campaigns — a political and fundraising weakness, not an ecological one.