The concept of a forest transition, which describes a regional shift from deforestation to forest recovery, tends to equate forest recovery with sustainability, implicitly assuming that more forest is good for people and the environment. In order to promote debate and more just and ecologically sustainable outcomes during this period of intense focus on forests (UN Decade on Ecological Restoration, Trillion Trees, COP 28…), we synthesize recent We propose nine pitfalls to such an uncritical equation, highlighting the need for a more nuanced and integrated research that to informs forest management and restoration in the future. The results are presented as nine pitfalls to assuming forest transitions and sustainability are automatically linked. The pitfalls are: (1) fixating on forest quantity instead of quality, (2) masking local diversity with large-scale trends, (3) expecting U-shaped temporal trends of forest change, (4) failing to account for irreversibility (5) framing categories and concepts as universal/neutral, (6) diverting attention from the simplification of forestlands into single-purpose conservation forests or intensive production lands, (7) neglecting social power transitions and dispossessions, (8) neglecting productivism as the hidden driving force, and (9) ignoring local agency and sentiments. We develop and illustrate these pitfalls with local- and national-level evidence from Southeast Asia and outline forward-looking recommendations for research and policy to address them. Forest transition research that neglects these pitfalls risks legitimizing unsustainable and unjust policies and programs of forest restoration or tree planting.