Ecosystem restoration – Global partnerships for expanding high level commitments to results

High-level public commitments raise both the domestic and international profiles of forest conservation and landscape restoration. They also increase the engagement of top political and business leaders, which helps to facilitate government- wide or enterprise-wide resolution of sectoral or departmental concerns that sometimes inhibit implementation. As noted in the introduction, such commitments are expanding rapidly.

The forest sector has led in this type of high-level coalition-building. The Bonn Challenge of 2011 invited governments, businesses and others to register pledges to restore deforested and degraded lands, with a goal of 150 million ha by 2020. As of late March 2015, 11 countries had committed to place roughly 60 million ha into restoration by 2020.49 The New York Declaration on Forests, launched in 2014 at the UN Climate Summit, included an explicit pledge to work together to cut natural forest loss in half by the end of the decade and end it entirely by 2030, the first time a large number of nations have agreed to a global target date for ending deforestation. The Declaration commits to end deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities such as palm oil, soy, paper and beef no later than 2020.

The New York Declaration also expanded on the Bonn Challenge, with a new goal of putting 350 million ha into restoration by 2030.50 That matches Aichi Target 15, which calls for restoring 15% of degraded ecosystems by 2030, and a 2011 estimate that there were 2.3 billion ha of degraded forest landscape globally.51 Better Growth, Better Climate estimated that this level of restoration could bring net economic benefits of about US$170 billion per year, including forest products, higher crop yields due to improved ecosystem services, and recreation.52 Along with the 130 initial signatories, others were invited to join, and as of August 2015, the total stood at 179, including governments, businesses, civil society organisations and indigenous peoples’ groups. These signatories pledged not only to work towards achieving the outcomes on the ground, but also to ensure that large-scale economic incentives are in place commensurate with the size of the challenge.53

In 2012, leading consumer goods companies partnered with a number of governments and environmental organisations to create the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 (TFA), a shared platform to eliminate deforestation from global commodity markets.