Publication

Forests provide crucial ecosystem services for human wellbeing, sustainable development, and ultimately, sustain life on Earth. The provision of these services is seriously threatened by continuing deforestation and land degradation. In response to these detrimental processes, there has been an unprecedented recognition over the past few decades of the urgent need to restore forest ecosystems. This is reflected in various global commitments, inter alia in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework of the Convention for Biological Diversity, in the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and in the Sustainable Development Goals. In alignment with these global agreements, global voluntary restoration initiatives—the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration on Forests and the United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030)—have set targets to restore millions of hectares of degraded ecosystems and deforested landscapes. Furthermore, countries, organisations and private entities have made voluntary commitments to restore millions of hectares. And yet, concretising and implementing these commitments in a just, sustainable and sustained fashion remains a challenging endeavour.

This brief presents some of the main messages and conclusions from the book Restoring Forests and Trees for Sustainable Development: Policies, Practices, Impacts, and the Ways Forward  developed by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations' Special Project World Forests, Society and Environment (IUFRO-WFSE). It gives an overview of the current global situation regarding forest restoration and related challenges and suggests ways for moving forward towards sustainable and just restoration with durable outcomes.