The Living Planet Report 2020 shows that there is an opportunity to heal our relationship with nature and mitigate risks of future pandemics but this better future starts with the decisions that governments, companies and people around the world take today. World leaders must take urgent action to protect and restore nature as the foundation for a healthy society and a thriving economy.

Humanity at a crossroads
Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO) is the flagship publication of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). It is a periodic report that summarizes the latest data on the status and trends of biodiversity and draws conclusions relevant to the further implementation of the Convention.

The 2020 Africa SDG Index and Dashboards Report provides an assessment of where African countries stand with respect to the SDGs and their progress toward the goals, with the additional lens of “leave no one behind.” The report also includes a preliminary analysis of the impact of COVID‑19 on the SDGs in Africa.

Restoration is more complex than just planting trees. It requires that farmers, rural communities, businesses, and government agencies—all with different interests—unite behind a shared vision. Establishing common goals and measuring progress facilitates deeper collaboration among diverse actors.

The multiple benefits of restoration, from local to global scales, are reflected in the array of global and regional goals for restoration.

‘Over the past three decades hundreds of thousands of farmers in Burkina Faso and Niger, on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, have transformed large swathes of the region’s arid landscape into productive agricultural land, improving food security for about three million people. Once-denuded landscapes are now home to abundant trees, crops, and livestock.'

Global strategies to halt the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change are often formulated separately, even though they are interdependent and risk failure if pursued in isolation. The Global Safety Net maps how expanded nature conservation addresses both overarching threats. We identify 50% of the terrestrial realm that, if conserved, would reverse further biodiversity loss, prevent CO2 emissions from land conversion, and enhance natural carbon removal.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were conceived at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 (Rio + 20), and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. They are part of a larger framework, namely the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Since then, many countries round the world have been engaging in respect of their implementation. The slow progress seen in the implementation of the SDGs, is in contrast with the many negative implications of not implementing them.

The West African Sahel is very vulnerable to the effects of climate change, due to land degradation, dependence on rainfed farming, political instability, poor governance, food insecurity, terrorism, poor infrastructure, and limited technical capacity. This has particular impacts on the agricultural sector (Sissoko et al. 2011; Zougmoré et al. 2016).

Valuable lessons can be learned from smallholder farmers who have successfully protected and regenerated tree cover across agricultural landscapes in Senegal, with minimal reliance on tree nurseries, seedling distribution or tree planting. In the process, they have restored soil fertility to sustainably increase agricultural production.

In the above initiatives, self-motivated populations increased food security and reduced vulnerabilities to climatic shocks by restoring and sustainably managing local forest resources. To regenerate agroforestry parklands, farmers built on traditional systems to increase on-farm tree density and convert degraded lands to densely wooded savannas. These actions increased crop yields and produced new sources of livestock browse. The population of Sambandé restored the local forest and managed it to sustainably produce fuel and fruit.

Unless countries can manage to mobilize millions of land users to invest their scarce resources in protecting regenerating trees, the battle against land degradation cannot be won. These experiences from Niger show that hundreds of thousands of smallholder farm families have substantially increased tree cover on their farm land by investing in the management of on-farm trees. This has improved their production systems and their livelihoods. There is no reason to believe that similar success cannot be achieved in many more countries throughout African drylands and sub-humid area.