Resources

Led by the Government of El Salvador, the call for a UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration is explained in this concept note. 

This publication provides facts, figures and key messages to encourage more investments in forest and landscape restoration, leading to more restoration action. The GPFLR outlines how we can reach the 2020 and 2030 targets, and how we can best collaborate, using regional and global platforms.

A Governance Approach to Landscape Restoration

Forest landscape restoration is all about who decides on what to be restored, how, and for what purpose. It does not aim to ‘just’ restore forests, but to restore landscapes as a whole. Not only by making use of cleverly designed restoration plans which  fit in the biophysical characteristics of the landscapes, but also by valuing the interests of a landscape’s inhabitants, users or ‘stakeholders’. Landscapes usually accomodate many different stakeholders, each of which having their own interests, contributions and priorities. It is the way in which these stakeholders interact, negotiate, and make landscape decisions which we call landscape governance.

Landscape governance is crucial to forest landscape restoration, to make sure that the restoration outcomes meet the interests of its inhabitants and users, and have it sustained. Landscape governance is not just a checklist that one can go through, but it is a process of stakeholder consultation, deliberation, negotiation, and making well informed choices. Such a process needs to be carefully facilitated, to make sure that its outcome is satisfying to the needs and interests of the stakeholders involved.

To help landscape stakeholders to initiate and facilitate such a process and bring it to a satisfying outcome, the Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation, supported by the World Resources Institute, developed a framework for assessing ‘landscape governance capacities’. The framework enables landscape stakeholders to collectively assess their existing landscape governance capacities, identify potential capacity gaps, and develop a roadmap for enhancing the capacities they want to strengthen.

Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) activities are often misunderstood as involving high up-front costs and low rates of return and these ideas persist because few evaluations of restoration activities include a comprehensive and objective accounting of restoration’s ecological and economic impacts.

Accounting for the impacts of restoration activities provides an opportunity to determine if their current designs warrant investments by governments, investors, and stakeholders, and when they do not preliminary analysis offers an opportunity to adjust restoration models so that investors see restoration as an investible opportunity.

To address this gap in knowledge this IUCN report presents a cost-benefit framework for accounting for the ecosystem service and economic impacts of FLR activities in a way that allows the results to be structured to inform multiple types of restoration decision-making that can help decision makers understand the trade-offs of different restoration scenarios.

Watch recordings of all sessions, landscape talks and digital summits from the 2018 GLF Investment Case in Washington DC.

Two new global datasets released on Global Forest Watch (GFW) enable us to say more about where forest biodiversity is located and how it is impacted by human disturbance.

With the launch of the Restoration Opportunities Optimisation Tool (ROOT), the world has a better way of making decisions on ecosystem services, specifically in support of the people who actually rely on them. 

Following over three years of development through a partnership between International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and The Natural Capital Project, ROOT is a software tool that optimises trade-offs among different ecosystem services to help decision-makers visualise where investments in restoration could be made that would optimise benefits for multiple landscape goals.

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and costs of restoring forests and landscapes in countries around the world, demonstrating how smart policies and innovative financing can help governments meet their restoration targets. The authors find that finance, both public and private, for restoration is inadequate for seven reasons, and offers solutions to these financial barriers.

Landscape approaches have become en vogue in the past couple of decades. Originating from nineteenth-century landscape geography, this renewed popularity since the 1980s is fueled by debates on—among others—nature conservation, landscape restoration, ecosystem services, competing claims on land and resources, sectorial land-use policies, sustainable development, and sense of place. This review illuminates the ambition and potential of these landscape approaches for interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration. To show this,wework with a T-shaped interdisciplinary model. After a short history of the landscape approaches, we dive into their key dimensions—from ecology to economics and culture to politics. Thereafter, we bring these dimensions together again and reflect on the integrative potential of landscape approaches for offering common ground to various disciplines and sectors. Two examples of applications are also dealt with: a landscape governance framework and a landscape capability framework.

This set of training materials makes Forest Genetic Resources (FGR) training relevant, attractive and accessible to non-specialists. It enables teachers and trainers to cover FGR issues in their courses, and increase understanding of how to manage diverse and complex forest and other tree based ecosystems sustainably. 

This document provides select case studies from the International Model Forest Network (IMFN) related to mainstreaming ecosystem restoration and biodiversity conservation.It has been developed as a supplement in support of a short-term action plan on ecosystem restoration for Parties to the CBD (UNEP/CBD/SBSTTA/20/12). 

The Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative is an international collaborative initiative of knowledge sharing, dialogue and action to support integrated landscape management in order to achieve three simultaneous goals: improved food production, ecosystem conservation, and sustainable livelihoods.

The Spatial Planning and Monitoring Guide: Maps to Link People with their Landscapes, developed by EcoAgriculture Partners and Cornell University for TerrAfrica, is designed to stimulate the use of maps in crosssectoral collaborations to locate, design and monitor interventions in rural landscapes

A Practical Approach to Forest and Landscape Restoration

Scaling Up Regreening: Six Steps to Success highlights the benefits of “regreening” and its widespread adoption in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, northern Ethiopia and Malawi, and identifies six steps to scale up regreening practices in Africa and beyond.

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 website contains more information on the challenge, the country commitments and current status

Established in 1994, the United Nations to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is the sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management. The Convention addresses specifically the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, known as the drylands, where some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and peoples can be found.

The Great Green Wall is an African-led movement with an epic ambition to grow an 8,000km natural wonder of the world across the entire width of Africa. 

To advance global efforts on forest landscape restoration - accelerating and strengthening progress from Bonn Challenge commitments to implementation - IUCN will periodically develop and publicize the Bonn Challenge Barometer profiling leadership and quantifiable progress on implementation of the Bonn Challenge and forest landscape restoration, and equip pledgers and partners with information to accelerate action and address implementation bottlenecks.

At the heart of InfoFLR are packages of country information that IUCN has generated and gathered through our work with partners around the world, including a review of each country’s domestic targets, policies and programmes related to restoration and status updates on national restoration opportunities assessments. 

AFR100 (the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative) is a country-led effort to bring 100 million hectares of land in Africa into restoration by 2030. AFR100 contributes to the Bonn Challenge, the African Resilient Landscapes Initiative (ARLI), the African Union Agenda 2063, the Sustainable Development Goals and other targets. 

A Method for Developing Forest Landscape Restoration Strategies by Rapidly Assessing the status of Key Success Factors

The Restoration Diagnostic is a three-step process for developing strategies for successful forest landscape restoration:

1. Users define the scope or geographic boundary within which to apply the diagnostic—such as a country, county, or watershed.
2. Users conduct an assessment to identify which key success factors are already in place—and which are not—within the landscape being considered for restoration.
3. Users identify which policies, incentives, and practices would address the missing factors.

The Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM), produced by IUCN and the World Resources Institute (WRI), provides a flexible and affordable framework for countries to rapidly identify and analyse areas that are primed for forest landscape restoration (FLR) and to identify specific priority areas at a national or sub-national level.

The FAO Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism (FLRM) aims to facilitate a process in selected countries that will support the enabling environment by strengthening institutional frameworks, organizational and technical capacity related to designing, planning and implementing large-scale FLR programmes.