The webinar “Restoring the Earth – The next decade, an introduction to Unasylva 252 in Chinese” took place on 29 March 2022 with simultaneous interpretation in English and Chinese.

This event presented the Chinese translation of issue 252 of FAO’s journal of forestry Unasylva, Restoring the Earth – The next decade.

This webinar was moderated by Mathilde Iweins, Forestry Officer, who highlighted key topics of the publication relevant to China, while emphasizing the vibrancy of restoration efforts at global level and offering a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities showcased in the report.

The representative of FAO in China, Carlos Watson, opened the session by stressing the importance of the critical role of healthy ecosystems and the services they provide, highlighting the international commitments to restore degraded ecosystems.

However, he underlined how much more still needed to be done to increase efforts, and how Unasylva 252 as a publication provided significant insights for improving restoration planning, implementation and monitoring.

Christophe Besacier, Senior Forestry Officer and Coordinator of the FAO’s Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism explained the meaning of forest and landscape restoration (FLR).
He underlined how this definition was based on increasing the number and improving the health of trees in a specific landscape, including through a landscape integrated approach where restoring biomes brings back biological productivity and achieves multiple benefits for people and the planet.

He then presented the three main sections of Unasylva 252, section one focusing on a new generation of initiatives, section two on FLR innovations and section three on enabling the global movement on restoration.

The next speaker was Luo Xi, Communication Officer at the Asia-Pacific Network for Sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation (APFNet), who described the lessons learned from China on how to upscale FLR activities.

As underlined in the latest Unasylva issue, China is among the few countries to have successfully reversed centuries of forest loss and degradation, increasing its total forest area. Forest cover in the country has progressed from 8.6 percent of the national land area at the time of the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, to 23 percent in 2018.

The next to take the floor was Ruchika Singh, Director of the Sustainable Landscapes and Restoration Programme at the World Resources Institute (WRI), India, who talked about WRI’s experience in measuring progress in FLR and the importance of FLR monitoring to report on the status and progress of FLR activities.

The last speaker was Han Meng, China Officer at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, who presented the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 and its goal to increase worldwide restoration efforts.

Referring back to Ruchika Singh’s presentation, Hang Meng stressed how monitoring restoration efforts at specific locations was critical to measuring progress towards the goals set by the UN Decade.

She also presented the UN strategy to trigger action in 2022, which is to select and showcase official flagships so as to inspire others to undertake or accelerate action at significant scale.

Christophe Besacier gave the closing remarks and reminded the attendees of the upcoming XV World Forestry Congress to take place in Seoul from 2 to 6 May 2022.

The webinar thus demonstrated the importance of looking at China as a positive example of FLR implementation.

As shown by Unasylva 252, the success of China in reversing centuries of forest degradation and loss shows that large-scale restoration is possible, given political leadership, multistakeholder involvement and an adaptive management approach.

For more information, please contact [email protected] 

Christophe Besacier (FAO) and Giorgio Millesimi (FAO)