Riparian Restoration Feasibility Under Climate Change: Prospective Land-Cover Scenarios for an Andean Headwater Microbasin

Restoration planning in tropical Andean headwaters is rarely tested against the climatic futures it must operate in, and rarely distinguishes what a strategy could achieve from what could actually be implemented. We modelled land-cover scenarios for the Molino River catchment (2018 ha, 2400–3600 m a.s.l., Cauca, Colombia) to evaluate a co-designed riparian restoration strategy. A first-order Markov chain, calibrated on transitions observed between 2000 and 2004 and 2023–2024, was coupled with a multinomial logistic model using bioclimatic predictors to allocate change spatially. The calibrated model reached an overall accuracy of 0.807 and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.912, values that spatial autocorrelation renders optimistic. Under two contrasting Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, baseline projections both showed páramo contraction and expansion of the productive mosaic. The strategy, represented through transition multipliers at three adoption levels, produced gross forest gains near 280 ha at medium adoption under both pathways, robust to perturbing every multiplier by 20 per cent. A slope, drainage and riparian-buffer feasibility index reduced these to 11.4 and 9.8 ha, around 4 per cent. Operational feasibility, rather than the emissions pathway, appears to limit delivery here.