Restoration work now covers 252 million hectares in 149 countries and has created more than one million green jobs, according to a UN report released in Yerevan on 29 October. The report calls it the largest restoration effort ever documented, but warns that the pace is too slow for the 2030 targets.
The report, Nature's comeback: scaling ecosystem restoration for people and planet, comes at the halfway point of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030). It was published jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and launched during the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP17). It is the first global check on the pledges to restore about one billion hectares and on the biodiversity target of having at least 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030.
Asia accounts for 192.2 million hectares of the documented total, followed by Africa with 36.3 million, Europe with 9.1 million, North and Central America with 5.8 million, South America with 5.4 million and Oceania with 3.2 million. The authors say these figures reflect the size of each region and its ability to monitor and report, not a ranking of performance. China reports the largest land area under restoration, 127.4 million hectares, with large areas also recorded in Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
Land ecosystems have reached nearly half of the 30 per cent target. Rivers, wetlands and coasts lag far behind, even though they are degrading fastest: only 11 million hectares of freshwater ecosystems in 62 countries and 5.7 million hectares of marine and coastal ecosystems in 46 countries are recorded as being restored. The share of countries reporting wetland restoration programmes has nonetheless risen from 8 per cent to 54 per cent since 2022, and the report notes that thin reporting may understate aquatic work.
Money is the main gap. Annual spending on restoration has to grow more than fourfold, from US$64 billion to US$296 billion by 2030, the report says, which could create up to 32 million jobs. The largest needs are in agroforestry (US$87 billion a year), restorative reforestation (US$52 billion), peatland restoration (US$44 billion) and seagrass restoration (US$28 billion).
"Five years into the UN Decade, the message is clear: restoration works," said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu, who called for restoration to become part of how land, water and natural resources are managed, alongside a change in agrifood systems. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said the world is "still not restoring nature at the scale or speed required".
Five initiatives in China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Italy and the United States were named UN World Restoration Flagships at the launch. The data behind the report come from government reports to global processes and from projects registered on FAO's Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring. For farmers, the weight the report puts on agroforestry, the largest single investment need, signals where restoration money is expected to go.
Source: FAONewsRoom
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