In the space of just five years, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration has delivered a wealth of tools, resources, guidance, and support to accelerate action on the ground and inspire practitioners of global restoration.
UN Decade Flagships offer lessons for restoration at scale
The UN Decade Pavilion, on Day 3 of SER2025, showcased the three pathways of the Decade: to build a global movement, generate political support, and develop capacity.
In the first session of the day, Christophe Besacier, Senior Forestry Officer with FAO, introduced the restoration Flagships – exceptional restoration projects that are “the best or most promising examples of large-scale and long-term landscape restoration initiatives, that embody the 10 Principles of the UN Decade and act as an inspiration for what can be achieved on a large scale.”
Representatives from five of the Flagships discussed the motivations, the challenges, and the outcomes that made their projects unique. The involvement of local communities and a network of other stakeholders was the strong thread that ran through these hugely diverse projects. “Stakeholder engagement is key in terms of implementing an ambitious Flagship like ours,” said Severin Kalonga of the Northern Mozambique Channel restoration project. “We have local government, civil society…more than 14 stakeholders involved in this Flagship.”
Being named as a UN Decade Flagship has offered significant visibility to these projects; nevertheless, funding remains a challenge for these ambitious initiatives. “In the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, we don’t have enough funding to restore the millions of hectares that are degraded. But now, as a UN Flagship, we have many more workers to help with the work we need to do,” said Rubens Benini of the Trinational Atlantic Forest Pact.”
A panel of UN Decade partners reinforced the role played by the Flagships in driving action for restoration around the globe. “From a practitioner perspective, we need to think more and more at the system scale and how we implement projects towards an end goal,” said Boze Hancock, Senior Marine Habitat Restoration Scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “The Flagships are a tremendous initiative and we need to highlight the work done at that level – at that scale – and make sure it filters down to the work that we all do.”
Bethanie Walder, Executive Director, Society for Ecological Restoration, concluded with a strong message about the need to demonstrate the impacts of restoration. “We need to start planning today for 2031 – to be thinking about the undertaking that goes with that. We need to show that restoration works, that it makes a difference. We need opportunities – like the UN Decade Flagships – to show that we can do this. To show that investments in restoration make a difference, for people, for nature, and for societies.”
Practical tools to measure and report on restoration projects on the ground
For restoration to occur – and accelerate – at all levels, it requires effective tools for monitoring, reporting, and evaluation of project outcomes. The final session at the UN Decade Pavilion showcased key resources to support practitioners on the ground.
A new online tool is being developed to help practitioners implement the UN Decade’s Standards of Practice for Ecological Restoration. The SOPER platform will be launched next year. A beta version of the tool was presented to participants to gather feedback that will inform the final version of the product.
The Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring (FERM) platform offers scalable, transparent, and harmonized monitoring tools, to enable governments, NGOs, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, researchers, and other stakeholders to register initiatives, share data, and showcase best practices.
Restore: Films from the frontier of hope
To end the day, a film session celebrated the transformative power of ecosystem restoration through five compelling documentaries. Each documentary highlighted a World Restoration Flagship and showcased how countries and communities are successfully restoring degraded landscapes, reversing biodiversity loss, and contributing to global climate and nature goals.
The UN Decade Pavilion at SER2025 served as an inspiration to delegates, connecting them with the global #GenerationRestoration movement, and exploring practical pathways to contribute to the UN Decade’s mission of preventing, halting, and reversing ecosystem degradation worldwide.
NOTE: A link to the recording of this session will be provided here once available.