Dry Sahelian landscape, Niger. Healthy ecosystems improve people’s lives and contribute achieving the SDGs.
Photo: ©FAO/Luis Tato

UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Healthy ecosystems form the foundation for efforts to improve people’s livelihoods, counter climate change, and halt the collapse of biodiversity. The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration aims to build a strong, broad-based global movement to ramp up restoration and put the world on track for a sustainable future.

Leaders in global politics, science, communities, religion and culture launched the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration on 4 June 2021 - a rallying call for the protection and revival of millions of hectares of ecosystems all around the world for the benefit of people and nature. It aims to halt the degradation of ecosystems and restore them to achieve global goals.

Led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration - which runs from 2021 to 2030 - was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in a 2019 resolution. The strategy focuses on three pathways: building a global restoration movement; increasing political will; and building the required technical and financial capacity for restoration at scale.

"By restoring ecosystems, we can drive a transformation that will contribute to the achievement of all the Sustainable Development Goals. The task is monumental. We need to replant and protect our forests. We need to clean up our rivers and seas. And we need to green our cities,"  UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. "Accomplishing these things will not only safeguard the planet's resources. It will create millions of new jobs by 2030, generate returns of over USD 7 trillion dollars every year and help eliminate poverty and hunger."

Stressing that in order to save our marine and terrestrial ecosystems, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said governments must ensure COVID-19 stimulus packages contribute to a sustainable and equitable recovery from the pandemic, while businesses and the financial sector must reform operations and financial flows so that they restore - and not destroy - the natural world. She urged individuals to rethink their choices where possible and raise their voices for restoration and a sustainable future.

The UN Decade aims to inspire and support governments, UN agencies, civil society, private sector companies, youth, women's groups, indigenous peoples, farmers, local communities and individuals globally, to collaborate, develop and catalyse restoration initiatives across the world. The effort will involve a raft of activities. They range from redirecting fiscal incentives and financial flows to promote restoration, through to undertaking research on restoration in terrestrial and marine environments, building the technical capacity of restoration practitioners globally and monitoring global progress on restoration.

The Decade aims to mobilise hundreds of millions of people to restore nature and foster a global restoration culture in which restoration initiatives are scaled up across the planet.

(UNEP/FAO/ile)

Read more at FAO website

Visit the website of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

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