The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 (hereafter “UN Decade”) aims to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation and recover biodiversity, and ecosystem integrity; enhance human health and well-being, including sustainable delivery of ecosystem goods and services; and mitigate climate change. To create a shared vision of ecosystem restoration, UN Decade partners, through a consultative process, launched ten principles for achieving the highest level of recovery possible through restoration projects.

To facilitate application of these principles and thereby maximize restoration outcomes for nature and people, the Standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration provide key recommendations for all phases of restoration projects. These recommendations are applicable to the broad array of restorative activities included as ecosystem restoration under the UN Decade, across all types of ecosystems (urban, production, cultural, semi-natural and natural) and restoration projects, from voluntary community member-led efforts to highly resourced, nationally funded projects.

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Peatlands are vital ecosystems, yet they face widespread degradation due to human activities such as agriculture and forestry. Recognizing their crucial role in climate regulation, international frameworks like the Convention on Wetlands advocate for their restoration. This Ramsar Technical Report serves as a beacon for regional planners, site managers, and policymakers, offering extensive guidance on peatland rewetting and restoration.

Key Messages

1. Global imperative: The Paris Agreement underscores the necessity to rewet nearly all drained peatlands globally, totaling over 50 million hectares, to mitigate climate change effectively.
2. Complete rewetting: Failure to fully rewet degraded peatlands leads to ongoing carbon emissions and eventual environmental collapse, emphasizing the urgency for comprehensive restoration efforts.
3. Conservation priority: While restoration is crucial, it cannot fully restore lost values. Thus, prioritizing conservation is paramount, ensuring the preservation of essential ecosystem functions.

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An indispensable guide to launch your funding journey and create a meaningful impact, specifically crafted for practitioners and professionals. This guide delivers crucial tips and insights sourced from GLF’s dynamic community and Luxembourg partners. Featuring a compelling case study from the Taniala Regenerative Camp in Madagascar, a community-based solution providing ground-level insights to enrich your learning experience.

Tips from GLF’s community

• Dedicated fundraising staff: Learn how dedicating staff to fundraising efforts and improving financial disclosure can enhance your competitiveness in funding applications. Consider investing in staff training.
• Financial stability and resilience: Discover strategies for building financial stability, such as income-generating activities and diverse funding avenues. Explore the possibility of applying for awards/prizes as an alternative funding source.
• Team capacity building: Strengthen your team’s capacity to identify resources by learning about different types of funding instruments. Develop the skills to identify resources most relevant to your project, create a budget plan, and determine the ideal funding size and type for your organization.

Tips from GLF-Luxebourg partners

• Aligning with donor objectives: When researching financial support for a project, understand the donor’s intentionality. Tailor your project proposal to match the preferences of the specific donor. Engage in open discussions to co-design a project that resonates with the donor’s interests.
• Networking at events: discover the importance of attending events to network with potential donors and build relationships that can support your projects.

Get insights from the ground

Be inspired by the success story of Taniala Regenerative Camp, located in Madagascar’s Menabe Region, is dedicated to restoring degraded land. Despite language barriers and a small team, they received an award in 2023 and won the Lush Spring Prize for soil restoration.

Now, their focus is on securing funding for full-time operations, expanding their team’s language skills, and seeking grants and awards for infrastructure development and village base camps.

Download now our guide to embark on a path of financial empowerment and impactful restoration initiatives!

Also, visit the GLF-Luxembourg platform.

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Learn how we can protect our food, water, carbon stocks and biodiversity by restoring landscapes

The climate and biodiversity crises are already affecting people and landscapes around the world. But there’s one natural remedy that can tackle them both: restoring degraded and damaged landscapes.

There are already countless restoration projects that are turning degraded landscapes into beacons of hope and resilience. At the Restoration Experiences Digital Forum, we got the chance to get to know some of these projects and meet the people behind them.

Discover how local restoration projects are reshaping landscapes globally, and get inspired to start your own!

Timestamps

0:00 Loop intro

5:26 Opening remarks

13:23 Harvesting restoration experiences

1:56:58 How policy and finance can support restoration

2:46:13 Announcement of the 2024 Restoration Stewards

2:50:33 Closing statement

Resources

Project presentations

7 steps to launch your own restoration project

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About GLF Nairobi 2023: ‘A new Vision for Earth’

The GLF Nairobi 2023 Hybrid Conference, held on October 11 and 12, convened global thought leaders to set the stage for COP28, the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference. This pivotal event mobilised action on critical issues affecting humanity, biodiversity, and our planet.

The conference featured two focused days: Day 1 centered on “Africa’s Sovereign Solutions,” exploring pathways to a sustainable and prosperous future for the continent. Day 2, dedicated to climate, aimed to craft a “Survival Guide for a Planet in Crisis,” paving the way for a fairer world ahead of COP28.

GLF Nairobi brought together a diverse coalition of influential voices, ranging from scientists, activists, and Indigenous leaders to financiers, women, youth, policymakers, and private sector representatives. As a united front, we collectively championed change and passionately advocated for meaningful action in these pivotal times.

About this session

In this insightful session, we explored the alignment of agroecology and ecosystem-based adaptation with three practical projects. The GIZ ProSoil project in Madagascar showcased the impact of agroecological practices on climate adaptation and food security. WWF Kenya highlighted capacity-building for ecosystem-based adaptation, and a GIZ Project spanning Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala illustrated how ecosystem-based adaptation can be scaled up in Latin America to foster more resilient rural landscapes.

This session aimed to strengthen the connections between these approaches, with a closing statement from Oliver Oliveros from the Agroecology Coalition.

Resources

• Agroecology, making ecosystem-based adaptation work in agricultural landscapes;
• Resilient landscapes – Five key messages on how to implement agroecology as a systemic adaptation response;
• Living Adaptation – Pathways to climate resilient agri-food systems

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About the 6th GLF Investment Case Symposium

Hosted in Luxembourg and online, GLF–Luxembourg Finance for Nature 2023: What comes next? united 4,500 participants from 160 countries around how finance can solve – rather than exacerbate – the climate and biodiversity crises. The event featured 106 speakers and 100 global and local partner organizations and reached 10 million people on social media, with more than 230,000 engagements.

Courtney Lowrance on how Citi is investing in nature

In this video from GLF–Luxembourg Finance for Nature 2023, Courtney Lowrance, managing director for sustainability and transitions at Citi, explains how the investment giant is raising funds for ecosystem restoration.

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The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 recognizes the critical need to prevent, halt, and reverse the degradation of the world’s ecosystems. Effective restoration of degraded ecosystems is of paramount importance for recovering biodiversity, ecosystem health and integrity, ecosystem goods and services, climate-change mitigation, and human health and well-being.

UN Decade partners, through a consultative process, offered ten principles for ecosystem restoration to create a shared vision and increase the likelihood of achieving the highest level of recovery possible.

To facilitate the application of these principles to restoration projects, the Standards of Practice to guide ecosystem restoration provide key recommendations for the entire restoration process, which can be applicable across all sectors of society, land or sea uses, ecosystems, and regions, and to the broad array of ecosystem restoration activities under the UN Decade. The goal of this document is to provide an overview of the Standards of practice.

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About the Rewilding Community of Practice

The Rewilding Community of Practice aims to build a network of rewilding enthusiasts and professionals who can exchange ideas and information to help build a better world.

The virtual community gathering ‘Fascinating Fungi: Invisible Allies in Rewilding’ held on Tuesday, the 22nd of November 2022, aimed to bring a fantastic opportunity for rewilders to learn more about the incredible role fungi play in rewilding – and how to rewild mycological networks – from three experienced practitioners who work on turning these invisible allies into a visible force for good.

About the speakers

David Satori, Founder of Rewilding Mycology

David Satori is a mycologist, consultant, and the founder of Rewilding Mycology. He holds a MSc in Plant and Fungal Taxonomy, Diversity, and Conservation. He is a former Species Conservation Researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew where he contributed to IUCN Red List assessments of tropical plant species.

David has extensive experience designing fungal surveys, generating baseline data, and recognising opportunities for fungal conservation on sites with various land use histories. He draws from his experience at Kew Gardens, where he managed large databases on plant documentation, distribution, population trends, and threats. He will introduce the field of rewilding mycology , highlight the importance of science being fungi-inclusive and discuss recent strides in the field.

Michael Hathaway, Professor at World Matsutake Research Group – Simon Fraser University

Michael Hathaway is a cultural anthropologist working in China for over a quarter century on two major topics. His first project explored how global conservation programs were re-configured by Chinese scientists, villagers and wild animals (such as Asian elephants), and his second examines the role of fungi in reshaping economies and ecologies on a vast scale.

He will speak about a mindset shift the world urgently needs: a shift from viewing other organisms as objects of utility (as things to be eaten, commodified or even used in rewilding projects) to fellow beings that are also worldmakers. What might it mean to recognize the presence and power of fungi all around us, especially from this different perspective?, he asks.

Bethan Manley, Program Manager Global Data Science at SPUN

Bethan began studying underground fungal networks during a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge examining Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi and their genetic interactions with crop plants. She has since continued work on the genomics of symbiotic fungi as a Postdoctoral Researcher, and worked as a Senior Computer Biologist at the Sanger Institute, UK, on the Tree of Life Project that aims to sequence all eukaryotic species on Earth.

Bethan now works for SPUN | Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, a non-profit initiative that aims to map, understand, and conserve underground mycorrhizal fungal networks. She will speak about the awe-inspiring work the SPUN team does of mapping underground mycorrhizal networks that regulate the Earth’s climate, and the advocacy and innovation work the organization do to protect and preserve our underground fungi kingdom.

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About the 6th GLF Investment Case Symposium

Hosted in Luxembourg and online, GLF–Luxembourg Finance for Nature 2023: What comes next? united 4,500 participants from 160 countries around how finance can solve – rather than exacerbate – the climate and biodiversity crises. The event featured 106 speakers and 100 global and local partner organizations and reached 10 million people on social media, with more than 230,000 engagements.

About this session

This session, organized by the World Bank-led Finance Taskforce under the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, highlighted some of the most promising models and financial solutions that are unlocking private investment in restoration across different sectors and ecosystems. Re-watch this session to learn more about these experiences in a dynamic conversation with corporate and financial leaders investing in restoration.

Resources

Report: Scaling up ecosystem restoration finance — A stocktake report

Presentation: Why, What & How: scaling sustainable and long-term agricultural lending in developing countries

Presentation: How to scale finance for ecosystem restoration

The post How to scale finance for ecosystem restoration: Solutions from the private sector and development partners appeared first on Global Landscapes Forum.

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is an initiative led by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which aims to drive the restoration of one billion hectares of degraded land between now and 2030.

The UN Decade is a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems around the world, for the benefit of people and nature. Only with healthy ecosystems can we enhance people’s livelihoods, counteract climate change, and stop the collapse of biodiversity. The UN Decade Finance Task Force (FTF), chaired by the World Bank, aims to catalyze action which can contribute to unlocking the capital needed to meet the Decade’s goals. ‘Unlocking Restoration Finance: A Stocktake Report’ is the first in a series of outputs of the FTF.

This report provides an overview of the current challenges and opportunities for increasing public and private investment in restoration. It looks at innovative approaches to financing restoration activities taken by actors in the public, private, or non-profit sectors and the potential for these to be replicated or scaled. The report also lays out a draft roadmap of actions the FTF will take to overcome challenges and contribute to scaling investment in restoration.

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