The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is an initiative led by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which aims to drive the restoration of one billion hectares of degraded land between now and 2030. The UN Decade is a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems around the world, for the benefit of people and nature. Only with healthy ecosystems can we enhance people’s livelihoods, counteract climate change, and stop the collapse of biodiversity.

The UN Decade Finance Task Force (FTF), chaired by the World Bank, aims to catalyze action which can contribute to unlocking the capital needed to meet the Decade’s goals. ‘Unlocking Restoration Finance: A Stocktake Report’ is the first in a series of outputs of the FTF. This report provides an overview of the current challenges to and opportunities for increasing public and private investment in restoration. It looks at innovative approaches to financing restoration activities taken by actors in the public, private, or non-profit sectors and the potential for these to be replicated or scaled. The report also lays out a draft roadmap of actions the FTF will take to overcome challenges and contribute to scaling investment in restoration.

The primary audiences of this report are governments and donors, the financial sector, and real-sector companies – all the decision makers with a role to play in scaling up finance for restoration. The scale of the converging climate change, nature loss, and land degradation crises requires coordinated cross-sectoral action to develop systemic solutions to these complex and pressing challenges. It is exactly this sort of collaboration that the FTF aims to support through the publication and its broader efforts.