By Ewald Rametsteiner, Deputy Director, and Christophe Besacier, Senior Officer, Forestry Division, FAO

In the race to tackle climate change and ensure both people and the planet can thrive, Africa faces some of the greatest challenges. At the heart of these challenges is the battle to ensure that land remains fertile enough to produce food for a growing population.

In recent decades, intensive farming and overgrazing, combined with extraordinary pressure from extreme weather, poverty, conflicts, urban expansion, and pollution, have led to once green landscapes becoming dry and barren across Africa. Almost 65% of the continent’s potentially productive land is now degraded and 45% is affected by desertification. With so much less productive land, Africa now spends USD 35 billion per year on food imports.

But it is possible to repair damaged ecosystems and to create new ones in places where nature has been degraded or destroyed, and the current UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is promoting global cooperation to do just this.

Trees, bushes, and grasses need to be planted, at scale, to regenerate many ecosystems. This can be achieved using carefully selected species, techniques such as creating microbasins to gather water around plants, and technology to help communities monitor and share data on weather changes, pests, and diseases.  

At the same time, more sustainable farming techniques need to be widely adopted. That means, for example, planting trees on farms (agroforestry) to hold soil together, improve its quality, retain water, and provide shade for animals (silvopasture). It means switching to sustainable farming methods like growing a variety of crops rather than just one, and choosing native plants that improve soil quality and productivity.

Restoring damaged land makes it productive again, improving food and water security. It also provides livelihoods and many agricultural products and ecosystem services that local communities and the world at large depend upon.

Restoration can therefore play a major part in achieving the SDGs by 2030, especially SDG 15 (life on land), as well as helping to mitigate the effects of climate change (SDG 13).

Since 2015, 34 African countries have set themselves the challenge of together restoring at least 100 million hectares by 2030 under the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, known as AFR100.

With some 70% of the population making their living from the land, the social capital, motivation, and trust between Africa’s smallholder farmers allows for collective landscape interventions on the scale that is needed.  

However, Africa’s rural communities including forest and farm producers and Indigenous Peoples are often among the poorest and most isolated people in the world. They often do not have legal tenure over the land they work or a voice in local policy making. They often cannot afford to invest in new tools or to lose income while exploring new ways of working. With increased international support they can overcome some of these barriers.

At the UN Climate Change Conference in November 2022, Germany and other countries committed to substantively increasing support for forest and landscape restoration and direct support for local communities, including Indigenous Peoples.

Launched this week on Restoration Day at the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 16), a new multi-partner programme led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) puts those commitments into practice.

With EUR 40 million funding from the German government, the programme will support communities in six African countries over the next four years with direct finance and technical assistance to enable them each to restore 7,000 hectares and improve the management of another 20,000 hectares.

Direct and more accessible finance, including blended finance solutions that mobilize private sector capital, will allow communities to strengthen their governance and their voice, invest in science-led restoration projects, and develop restoration-based businesses. There will be training and information sharing on best practice and science as well as on how to monitor and communicate results, in restoration and in creating business opportunities and jobs.

The programme will not only help to accelerate progress towards the AFR100 goals, it will also enhance local livelihoods, with a focus on women and youth.

But this is just the start. The model of this programme has the potential to be replicated across Africa and beyond. The programme is aiming to raise additional funds – at least USD 100 million – for other African countries and in other regions.

It is by supporting the people on the ground that nature can be brought back from the brink.