UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration


The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 was conceived as a means of highlighting the need for greatly increased global cooperation to restore degraded and destroyed ecosystems, contributing to efforts to combat climate change and safeguard biodiversity, food security, and water supply.

Proclamation

During the Bonn Challenge 3.0 high-level meeting in March 2018, El Salvador announced plans to propose a United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030, aimed at boosting existing efforts to restore degraded ecosystems. El Salvador's leadership on ecosystem restoration arose out of its support for the Bonn Challenge, which aims to restore 350 million hectares of degraded ecosystems globally by 2030, and endorsement of the New York Declaration on Forests. As one of the six Bonn Challenge pilot countries, El Salvador has pledged to restore 1 million hectares, equivalent to half of the country’s territory.
71 countries supported the proposal at its presentation by El Salvador’s Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Lina Pohl, to the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2018. On 1 March 2019, the UN General Assembly officially adopted the resolution declaring 2021–2030 the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.
According to Minister Pohl, “Ecosystem restoration promoted through this UN Decade takes a multi-functional landscape approach, looking at the mosaic of interdependent land uses in which ecological, economic, social, and development-based priorities can find convergence, balance, and complementarity."

Rationale

The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 will focus on balancing ecological, social and developmental priorities in landscapes where different forms of land use interact, with the aim of fostering long term resilience.
An ecosystem includes all living organisms, and their interaction with each other and their physical environment. Each organism plays a key role and contributes to the health and productivity of the ecosystem as a whole. Ecosystems are interdependent, and damage or imbalance can have devastating and far-reaching consequences. Biodiversity underlies all ecosystem services, which are the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems, indispensable to health, survival and wellbeing. They include provisioning services, regulating services, and cultural services.
Human activities are affecting the capacity of ecosystems to provide these goods and services. Drivers of biodiversity loss and decline in ecosystem functioning include climate change, deforestation, desertification and land degradation, freshwater decline, overexploitation, stratospheric ozone depletion, and pollution. Degradation of land and marine ecosystems adds to the threat of mass species extinction, and has a negative impact on the well-being of some 3.2 billion people, costing around 10% of the annual global gross domestic product in loss of species and ecosystem services. Agricultural land and ecosystem degradation reduces resilience to climate change, which enhances the risk of catastrophic collapse in the face of rising temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns. The benefits future generations can obtain from ecosystems will be greatly diminished unless these problems are addressed.
Ecosystem restoration seeks to repair some of the damage done to ecosystems and biodiversity. It assists the recovery of degraded, damaged and destroyed ecosystems, to regain ecological functionality and provide goods and services of value to humans. The beneficial effects of ecosystem restoration include increased food and water security, contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and managing the associated risks of conflict and migration. The restoration of 350 million hectares of degraded terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems by 2030 could generate US$9 trillion in ecosystem services and remove 13 to 26 gigatons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The benefits obtained from ecosystem generation on average exceed the costs of the initial investment tenfold, whereas the cost of inaction is at least three times the cost of ecosystem restoration.

Opportunity and aims

Around 2 billion hectares of degraded lands worldwide have potential for ecosystem restoration. Most of the rehabilitation work could take the form of “mosaic restoration”, in which forests are combined with protected areas, agriculture, waterbodies, and human settlements on a landscape-wide scale.
Transformational ecosystem restoration requires strong commitment, and the efforts of countries, the international community, civil society, the private sector, and other actors. Achieving the Bonn Challenge objective of restoring at least 350 million hectares of degraded landscapes by 2030 could realize up to $9 trillion in net benefits, and alleviate poverty in many rural communities. The UN Decade aims to promote a concerted and holistic landscape-focused approach to the interdependence of ecosystems, human needs, and biodiversity, to accelerate the progress needed to maintain and restore ecosystems.
The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration was established in order to:
Ecosystem restoration is recognized as a key component in achieving targets under existing international conventions and agreements. These include the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and, under it, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2020 and its Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Paris Agreement, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and its target of Land Degradation Neutrality, the Ramsar Convention, and the United Nations Strategic Plan on Forests 2017 – 2030.
Ecosystem restoration will contribute to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, in particular to SDG15, SDG 2, SDG 6, SDG 7, SDG 12, SDG 13, SDG 14 and SDG 17. Paragraph 27 of the Ministerial Declaration of the High-Level Political Forum on the SDGs held in July 2018 sets out commitments made to achieve sustainable management of all types of forests, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests, and substantially increase afforestation and reforestation globally by 2020.
Planned activities during the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration are also designed to contribute to the Bonn Challenge to restore degraded and deforested land. The UN Decade builds on regional restoration efforts, such as Initiative 20x20 in Latin America, which aims to restore 20 million hectares of degraded land by 2020; and the AFR100 African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, that aims to bring 100 million hectares of degraded land under restoration by 2030.

Ecosystem restoration resolutions

Resolutions relevant to ecosystem restoration adopted during past Environment Assemblies of the United Nations Environment Program include:
The following resolutions adopted during the fourth UNEA, from 11 to 15 March 2019, highlight the importance of ecosystem restoration:
UN Environment and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations will lead the implementation of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Other key bodies and forums involved are the Center for International Forestry Research, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Global Landscapes Forum. In supporting the UN Decade, they will partner with other UN agencies, bodies and convention secretariats, and with international and indigenous organisations.