After a quarter-century of restoration in a heavily degraded river basin in Costa Rica, a “model forest” platform is helping a local foundation to promote the benefits of its work and boost business in an economically depressed region.*

The area surrounding the headwaters of the Nosara River, which flows from the highlands of the Nicoya Peninsula into the Pacific Ocean, suffered deforestation under a past government policy that encouraged large-scale land clearing for agriculture and cattle ranching.

Farmers in poor rural areas of Guatemala are learning how agroforestry incorporating the culturally important breadnut tree can boost their nutrition and income as well as restoring degraded land through deforestation*.

In a pilot project, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations assisted 38 smallholder families in Petén, the northernmost department of Guatemala, to become “restoration farmers.” Their plots will serve as demonstration sites for efforts to scale up the initiative to the regional level.

The objective of the India Ecosystem Services Project (ESIP), which is under preparation, is to improve forest quality, land management, and nontimber forest produce (NTFP) benefits for forest dependent communities in selected landscapes in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It is designed to enhance the outcomes of the national Green India Mission, which targets improving the quality of forests in about 5 million hectares.

This project aims to strengthen the National Protected Areas System and to support sustainable land use and restoration practices in selected areas of the Dry Corridor of Nicaragua, in order to foster biodiversity conservation, resilient landscapes, and local livelihoods.

Burundi’s economy is dominated by small-scale agriculture practiced on the slopes of hills and mountains. The burgeoning population and an overwhelming reliance on natural resources by 90 percent of the population have both caused aggravated environmental degradation. The recent World Bank Country Environment Analysis estimates that each year, almost 38 million tons of soil is lost and land degradation cost 4% of the country’s GDP. Soil erosion worsens Burundi’s socioeconomic situation, and particularly affects the poorest.

Sahelian Africa is significantly affected by rainfall variability. Its populations are among the poorest and most threatened by climatic changeability and land degradation, as they depend heavily on healthy ecosystems to sustain their livelihoods. Increasing pressures on food, fodder, and fuelwood have a significant impact on the environment; and frequent droughts and poorly managed land and water resources contribute to expanding soil erosion. The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative emerged in 2007 to address climate change, land degradation, and desertification.

The five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) are among the Europe and Central Asia Region’s most vulnerable to climate change; building resilience is thus a priority for poverty reduction and shared prosperity in Central Asia. Such impacts are already being felt and are expected to intensify, with the agriculture, energy, and water sectors most at risk.

Desertification in arid and semiarid areas of Northwest China is a major current environmental issue for the country, caused by the interaction of a naturally dry climate, recurrent periods of prolonged droughts, anthropogenic factors over long periods of time, and specific topographic and geographic conditions. Among the anthropogenic factors are poor land management, inadequate farming techniques and over-cultivation, overgrazing and the removal of natural vegetation; misuse of water resources; and poor environmental and ecosystem management.

When development impacts a broad landscape and causes the loss of multiple ecosystem services, decisions about which of these impacts to offset must be made. We use industrial oil-palm developments in Kalimantan and quantify the potential for restoration to offset oil-palm impacts on carbon storage and biodiversity. We developed a unique backcasting approach combined with a spatial conservation prioritisation framework to identify priority areas for restoration offsetting.

The protection and revival of degraded and deforested land is the need of the hour. In order to tackle the issues that arise as a consequence of degradation and deforestation, principles of forest landscape restoration are being globally promoted. The Bonn Challenge is a global effort to bring 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded land into restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. The government of India made a Bonn Challenge pledge to bring under restoration 13 million hectares of degraded land by 2020 and an additional 8 million hectares by 2030.

Biodiversity is inherent in forest landscape restoration. As global initiatives like the Bonn Challenge and New York Declaration on Forests inspire nations to pursue sustainable landscapes and economic growth, on the ground, biodiversity binds people and nature to their shared future. Restoring ‘forward’ to meet current and future landscape challenges requires novel approaches and nature-based solutions. Restoration has the potential to generate billions in economic returns and to mitigate many of the effects of humaninduced climate change.

Financing forest restoration with the private sector – Does it work?