Reviving land and restoring landscapes: policy convergence between forest landscape restoration and land degradation neutrality

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals will continue to influence global development policy in the coming decade, prompting a need for ever greater financial support and political will to achieve the 17 goals. Among these, Goal 15 on the sustainable use and management of land resources embodies a major shift in the way the international community responds and manages land degradation. Four years after its adoption, Goal 15 continues to inspire positive change in global land and landscape restoration efforts, now embodied by the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030, declared by the United Nations General Assembly in March 2019. This is expected to accelerate and further mobilise action and resources to massively scale up restoration, build resilience and reduce vulnerability, while responding to the ever-pressing challenges of sustainable development. This international backing and momentum have the potential to deliver and even surpass global restoration commitments by 2030. The Rio Conventions (the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, UNCCD; the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC; and the Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD) have together championed the political impetus for restoration. Countries have already begun taking the steps towards protecting, sustainably managing and restoring their degraded lands, by committing to national, regional and global initiatives. Country commitments towards the achievement of land degradation neutrality (LDN), a target of Goal 15 and the Bonn Challenge, both by 2030, are two such examples. More than 120 countries have voluntarily engaged in the process of setting national targets to achieve LDN, with the support of the UNCCD, and 56 countries and subnational jurisdictions have made voluntary pledges to the Bonn Challenge. Countries have publicly announced their commitments to restore degraded forests and lands. This report comes at a time when many countries are fully engaged in the challenging task of implementing their LDN targets and Bonn Challenge pledges with a goal to achieve them by 2030. The connection between the Bonn Challenge commitments and the LDN targets could strengthen synergy and catalyse actions at national level that will help in achieving their goals in a coherent and efficient manner. The report shows that countries and their international partners need to create a policy environment conducive to supporting restoration, strengthening (inter)sect…