Attachments
Executive Summary
The prevalence of land degradation is evident at a global scale. Between 20 and 40 per cent of the world’s land surface is degraded or is undergoing degradation. This is primarily driven by the expansion of agriculture, mining and urban sprawl. The results are wetland drainage, soil erosion and loss of biodiversity. These, in turn, are aggravated by more intense and frequent weather extremes triggered by climate change. The deterioration of land and natural resources has serious impacts on livelihoods, food security and the overall resilience of people, communities and societies at large.
Land restoration is widely recognized as an effective approach to addressing these challenges, meeting human needs and improving biosphere stewardship. Land restoration not only aims to avoid, reduce and reverse land degradation, but it also supports more productive landscapes, addresses climate change and reduces biodiversity loss. Furthermore, it opens the opportunity for fostering sustainable livelihoods, decent work and human well-being.
To date, however, land restoration activities have also presented problems. Many of these activities, for example, focus on improving biodiversity or on sequestering carbon without due considerations for the well-being of those affected. This is despite the need for these activities to deliver co-benefits, such as income opportunities or improved agricultural yields, to incentivize and facilitate local acceptance and participation and to make the activities effective.
Integrating the policy objectives of social protection and financial inclusion, along with disaster risk finance instruments, within land restoration efforts can help ensure these co-benefits. Carefully incorporating them into land restoration activities can make land restoration outcomes more equitable, especially where trade-offs between different land-use aims result in negative effects for certain stakeholders. Social protection relies on different policy instruments for safeguarding people from poverty and risks to their livelihoods and for ensuring their well-being. Examples of these policy instruments are pension plans, unemployment benefits and public work. Financial inclusion supports access to useful and affordable financial products and services, such as credit and insurance. For example, efforts to ensure financial inclusion can involve promoting financial literacy or supporting microcredit schemes. Disaster risk finance instruments support the work of land restoration, social protection and financial inclusion policy instruments by addressing the fiscal impacts of natural hazards and enhancing resilience.
Recognizing this, the UNCCD COP decision 20/COP.15 para 51 requested guidelines to support the design of inclusive policies to make land restoration more attractive in terms of social protection, financial inclusion and disaster risk finance. In response, this guide describes the policy objectives of land restoration, social protection and financial inclusion, as well as the instruments of disaster risk finance, and identifies opportunities for building synergies between them. Three iterative steps are presented to guide the design of coherent policy instruments and programmes for land restoration, social protection, financial inclusion and disaster risk finance that leverage synergies to achieve their shared objective of enhancing human well-being. In this way, the document directly builds on and complements other guides intended to direct the effective and equitable implementation of land restoration initiatives, such as the Standards of Practice to Guide Ecosystem Restoration published in 2024 by FAO, SER and IUCN as a contribution to the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030.