Restoration financing reaches $26 billion across 18 countries

At the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Conference of the Parties (CBD COP15), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) launched its first Restoration Barometer Report.

This report documents financial investments of $26 billion across 18 countries and 14 million hectares of degraded landscapes, measuring the countries’ progress against their international restoration commitments (including UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, Bonn Challenge, Paris Agreement, or 1t.org.)

The report provides a way to see progress against global restoration targets and tracks restoration benefits across all terrestrial ecosystems - including coastal and inland waters. 

To measure both benefits and progress, countries record their restoration policies, modes of planning, monitoring systems, and funding structures that they are using now and will continue to use to meet goals. These metrics help to track the sizes of the areas under restoration, plus the corresponding climate, biodiversity, and socio-economic benefits that result from the implemented restoration programs.

Natalia Alekseeva, UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration Coordinator, UN Environment Programme, said, “The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration can only succeed if we measure progress on the ground. This is where tools like IUCN’s Restoration Barometer are crucial. Countries have promised to restore 1 billion hectares - an area the size of China. But where is that restoration happening? And how successful is it? The Barometer is already and will continue to be essential in answering this question, and we anticipate close collaboration with the UN Decade’s monitoring platform, the Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring.” 

In the future, the Barometer will also be able to be used when restoring and monitoring seagrasses, kelp, and shallow reefs and by companies seeking to set and track restoration targets.