In 1993, Chile adopted an Indigenous Law that enabled land restitution; by 2023 more than 510,000 acres had been returned to Mapuche communities, but native forest cover had barely changed

In 1993, Chile passed a major Indigenous Law that created a formal process for returning ancestral land to Indigenous communities. Over the following 30 years, more than 510,000 acres were returned to the Mapuche, Chile's largest Indigenous group. However, a long-term study found that native forest cover on these lands has changed very little. Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Talca studied 1,577 parcels returned to Mapuche ownership between 1994 and 2023. The study, published in Nature Sustainability, found that commercial non-native forest plantations decreased by 18%, while agricultural pasture increased by 4.5%. However, there was no statistically significant improvement in biodiversity, carbon storage or soil erosion control. The findings challenge the idea that returning land to Indigenous communities automatically leads to environmental restoration.

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