Global Forest Landscape Restoration Initiatives
Forest landscape restoration (FLR) is gaining importance around the world.
Defining Forest Landscape Restoration
FAO outlines forest landscape restoration as an integrating framework that can be applied across a range of land uses to ensure that key ecosystem goods and services are available to present and future generations and deal effectively with the uncertainties of climatic, economic and social change. It aims to restore a range of forest functions in order to strengthen the resilience and ecological integrity of landscapes and to involve local communities in these processes.
IUCN defines forest landscape restoration as the ongoing global process of regaining ecological functionality of deforested and degraded forest landscapes. More than just planting trees, FLR is restoring a whole landscape and its ecosystems to meet present and future needs and to offer multiple benefits and land uses over time to enhance human well-being.
Restoring forest ecosystems and landscapes includes returning trees to former forest land, improving the condition of degraded forests with sylvicultural measures, planting native tree species, allowing for natural regeneration, and improving agroforestry practices, watershed protection and erosion control.
Learn more about forest landscape restoration in the UNECE region here.
A nature-based solution
Forest landscape restoration has been acknowledged as a nature-based solution that delivers multiple mitigation and adaptation outcomes and accelerates the achievement of international commitments, including the Sustainable Development Goals 2030, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets of the Convention on Biodiversity, the goals under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and the Paris Agreement, the Land Degradation Neutrality Goals, several of the Global Forest Goals and Targets of the UN Strategic Plan for Forests 2030, and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 objectives.
There are an increasing number of global initiatives for forest landscape restoration to catalyse global forest landscape restoration efforts.
Learn more about a few of the global initiatives for forest landscape restoration below.
The Bonn Challenge launched in 2011 as an open, voluntary discussion and global exchange platform for concrete action and cooperation to facilitate the implementation of forest landscape restoration. It seeks to bring 150 million ha of the world's degraded and deforested lands into restoration by 2020 and 350 million ha by 2030, contributing to vital climate mitigation efforts, reversing degradation, improving productivity and increasing the resilience of landscapes, providing ecosystem services that benefit people and biodiversity.
Global Landscape Forum (GLF) is the world’s largest knowledge-led platform on sustainable and inclusive landscapes. Initiated in 2013, GLF supports a global community working together to find the right tools to support locally-led landscape restoration actions and measure progress. With science and traditional and local community knowledge at its core, the GLF is designed to spark multi-stakeholder dialogue, share knowledge, inspire action and accelerate best practice in addressing some of the most complex problems facing our earth and our communities.
New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF) adopted in 2014 and refreshed in 2021 is a political declaration calling for global action to protect and restore forests. It offers a common, multi-stakeholder framework for forest action, consolidating various initiatives and objectives that drive forest protection, restoration, and sustainable use. Its goals are to halt natural forest loss by 2030, restore 350 million hectares of degraded landscapes and forestlands, improve governance, increase forest finance, and reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation as part of the Paris Agreement.
The Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration (GPFLR) is a proactive global network that unites governments, organizations, academic/research institutes, communities and individuals under a common goal: to restore the world’s lost and degraded forests and their surrounding landscapes. The GPFLR does this by catalysing support, creating knowledge network to accelerate restoration efforts and capacity development.
Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use signed in 2021 by 141 countries during the Climate Change Conference (COP26) saw signatories commit to work collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030 while delivering sustainable development and promoting an inclusive rural transformation.
1t.org is part of the World Economic Forum’s efforts to accelerate nature-based solutions and was set up to support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030. Its objectives are in conserving, restoring and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030 by mobilizing the private sector, facilitating multi-stakeholder partnerships in key regions, and supporting innovation and ecopreneurship on the ground.
