New guide can help breathe life back into degraded forests and landscapes through better measurement and tracking of restoration efforts

Forest and land degradation affects 3.2 billion people around the world, reducing crop yields, threatening water supply and making communities more vulnerable. Restoring forests, farmland and pastures can effectively help reverse this damage and compensate the negative effects of deforestation, but implementation is complex. A new guide from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Resources Institute (WRI) provides detailed guidance to governments, businesses and communities to help create restoration frameworks and track tangible results. Countries like Brazil, El Salvador, Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Malawi are already using this methodology to measure land restoration’s real impact, and now the rest of the world can as well.   

FAO and WRI released “The Road to Restoration: A Guide to Identifying Priorities and Indicators for Monitoring Forest and Landscape Restoration” today at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration (GPFLR), in Luxembourg.

“People restore land for different reasons, to adapt to the changing climate, to improve agricultural yields, to protect traditional livelihoods, or to conserve biodiversity”, said Faustine Zoveda, FAO Forestry Officer, Forestry Policy and Resources Division. “FAO and WRI created a guide to help anyone actively restoring land design a system to measure progress on the restoration goals they like to see achieved.”

The pressure on land to satisfy more and more human needs is driving degradation, with a very high cost for people and economies, with small farmers, herders and rural communities being affected the most. Restoration is a clear necessity, but in order to fulfill our achievements we must track its effectiveness.   

Fifty-four countries have committed to restore more than 170 million hectares of land as part of the Bonn Challenge and regional alliances — like AFR100 in Africa and Initiative 20x20 in Latin America, regional restoration dynamics in the Mediterranean and Asia-Pacific regions and the recently launched ECCA30 in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia — seek to enable implementation by aligning investment and policies aimed at achieving their targets.

Despite these commitments, land is not being restored as quickly as needed.  Approximately 24 billion tons of fertile land are lost every year, which leads to dangerous food security implications. 

The Road to Restoration offers a methodology to facilitate the process of establishing goals and identifying high-quality data and metrics tailored to each specific landscape to help revive degraded land. Choices on how to use land sustainably can be complex, especially because different people and groups have different priorities and constraints. This guide aims to provide a step-by-step approach to help people make informed decisions.

The guide will walk practitioners through the process to create a framework to measure progress using weighted indicators. This can have multiple benefits, like helping communities visualize how productivity returns to their croplands, how water supply improves and assisting financiers see return on their investments. It can also provide governments with a valuable reference point to design comprehensive national or subnational land restoration strategies.

In Malawi, for instance, government agencies and communities used this methodology to evaluate improvements in yields and water supply. Furthermore, in El Salvador, the Ministry of the Environment can now assess how coastal communities can better adapt to climate change impact.

“Strong data help people make better choices about how to bring life back to their land,” said Fred Stolle, WRI Deputy Director for Forests. “Widespread use of the tool could help drive revitalization of land ecosystems that sequester carbon and improve resilience at the scale demanded by the climate crisis.”

In the context of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which begins in 2021, The Road to Restoration is a tangible contribution to help national and subnational governments, communities, the private sector and practitioners boost their efforts to regenerate degraded land. It is a tool to help turn climate ambition into action, based on healthy forests and landscapes to decrease carbon emissions.

To learn more about and access the guide, please click here