A record, and a shortfall
Countries are restoring about 252 million hectares of nature, according to a UN report published on 29 October. The area is roughly the size of Argentina or Algeria, and the effort has created more than one million green jobs.
"This report captures the largest documented restoration effort in history," said Doreen Robinson of the UN Environment Programme at a press conference in Yerevan, where the assessment was released.
The same numbers show the gap. Governments have promised to restore one billion hectares under the Paris Agreement, the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity framework, land degradation neutrality targets and the Bonn Challenge. Reaching that by 2030 requires the current pace to roughly triple.
Land first, water last
Most recorded work is on land: 232 million hectares. Inland waters account for 11 million hectares and marine and coastal systems for 5.7 million.
The report warns that freshwater, coastal and marine restoration lags far behind ambition, even though those ecosystems are degrading fastest. Mangroves, seagrass beds and floodplains store carbon and buffer storms, which makes their neglect expensive later.
Money and monitoring
Funding is the binding constraint. Public budgets cover the early phases, but the report says private capital has to scale sharply, and that investors need standard measures before they will count a restored watershed as an asset.
The assessment, titled Nature's comeback: scaling ecosystem restoration for people and planet, was produced by UNEP, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. It arrives at the midpoint of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which runs from 2021 to 2030, and is the first comprehensive global stocktake against the one-billion-hectare pledges. Under the decade, World Restoration Flagships are named to highlight large-scale, long-term projects that follow the ten restoration principles agreed by the programme.
The next checkpoint is COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, in November, where governments will review national plans that currently fall short of the target.