ReliefWeb

Mother Nature has provided us with all the tools we need to protect humanity from the violent and life-threatening spread of viral pandemics, rising seas, extreme weather, spiking temperatures, degraded habitats, uncontrolled wildfires and other catastrophes built from the sheer avarice of the human race.

If only we would listen.

One of the best tools is the very ecosystems we are destroying. With decades of experience in the field, UNDP is now bringing some of the world’s pioneering ecosystem-based climate change adaptation actions to scale.

On Earth Day, we look at how nations across the globe are harnessing the power of Mother Earth to heal herself and to protect her people from interconnected global crises that threaten to push millions into poverty, trigger mass migration, fuel ever-more powerful disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and undermine efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 through the United Nation’s Decade of Action.

IMPACT

In the last decade, UNDP’s ecosystem-based adaptation portfolio – made possible with over half a billion dollars in finance from the Adaptation Fund, Global Environment Facility and Green Climate Fund – has supported governments in replanting over 213,000 hectares of mangrove and forest, and protecting over two million hectares of land, 16,000 kilometres of vulnerable coastline and 145,000 hectares of marine habitat. These efforts to harness the power of nature to protect humankind have also brought 853,800 hectares of agricultural land under improved management, and improved lives and livelihoods of 25.5 million vulnerable people living on the frontlines of our global climate crisis.

See the full photostory here