UN: 252 mln hectares of ecosystems are being restored in 149 countries — Premium Times Nigeria

The UN reported that 252 million hectares of ecosystems are being restored in 149 countries. This work has already provided more than one million “green” jobs and is the largest documented global effort to restore nature, Premium Times Nigeria reports.

Targets for 2030

The assessment is presented in the report Nature’s comeback – scaling ecosystem restoration for people and planet, prepared by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environment Programme, and the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The document was released in the middle of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which runs from 2021 to 2030.

Countries have committed to restore around one billion hectares. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework also provides that by 2030, at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, freshwater, marine, and coastal ecosystems should be under effective restoration.

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Uneven progress and funding

Asia has the largest documented restoration area, at 192.2 million hectares. The figure is 36.3 million hectares in Africa, 9.1 million in Europe, 5.8 million in North and Central America, 5.4 million in South America, and 3.2 million hectares in Oceania. The report noted that these figures reflect the scale of activity, the size of regions, and monitoring and reporting capacities, rather than a ranking of restoration success.

Restoration of terrestrial ecosystems has approached half of the global 2030 target. At the same time, progress in freshwater, marine, and coastal ecosystems is significantly lower: in 62 countries, the restoration of 11 million hectares of freshwater ecosystems has been documented, while in 46 countries, 5.7 million hectares of marine and coastal ecosystems have been documented. The report’s authors cautioned that incomplete reporting may underestimate the actual scale of work in aquatic ecosystems.

According to the UN’s estimate, annual restoration funding must increase more than fourfold, from $64 billion to $296 billion by 2030. Such investments could potentially create up to 32 million new jobs worldwide.