Here is some climate and nature news that is not all doom. An area of land and water roughly the size of Kazakhstan is now being actively restored around the world, according to a new United Nations report, in what it calls the largest documented effort of its kind.
But there is a catch. The UN says the money going into restoration will have to more than quadruple if countries are to hit the targets they have signed up to by 2030.
A quarter of a billion hectares
The report, Nature’s comeback: Scaling ecosystem restoration for people and planet, was launched on 29 October at the COP17 UN biodiversity conference in Yerevan, Armenia. It was produced by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and marks the halfway point of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which runs to 2030.
Its headline finding is that 252 million hectares across 149 countries are now under restoration. That work has created more than one million so-called green jobs, according to UN News.
The progress is concentrated in some regions more than others. Asia accounts for 192.2 million hectares, with China alone reporting 127.4 million. Africa has 36.3 million hectares, Europe 9.1 million, North and Central America 5.8 million, South America 5.4 million and Oceania 3.2 million. The UN stresses that these differences reflect the size of countries, the scale of activity and how well it is monitored, not who is doing a better job.
Land is ahead, water lags behind
Under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, countries agreed to restore 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems by 2030. On land, the report says restoration has already reached nearly half of that target.
Rivers, lakes, wetlands and seas are a different story. Freshwater restoration covers around 11 million hectares across 62 countries, while marine and coastal restoration covers only 5.7 million hectares across 46 countries. The report warns that patchy reporting means these figures may be underestimates, but says aquatic restoration needs to speed up rapidly.
There is one encouraging sign: the share of countries reporting wetland restoration programmes has jumped from 8 per cent to 54 per cent since 2022.
The price of putting nature back
Annual spending on restoration currently stands at around US$64 billion. The report says it needs to rise to US$296 billion a year by 2030, which it estimates could create up to 32 million jobs.
The biggest investment needs are in agroforestry, which mixes trees with crops or livestock (US$87 billion a year), restorative reforestation (US$52 billion), peatland restoration (US$44 billion) and seagrass restoration (US$28 billion).
That peatland figure will catch the eye in Ireland, where bogs cover large parts of the west, including Connemara, and where rewetting degraded peat has become a significant part of climate and nature policy.
The potential prize is large. Research cited in the report suggests that restoring 15 per cent of the world’s priority areas could help avoid 60 per cent of expected species extinctions and store carbon equivalent to 30 per cent of the emissions produced since the Industrial Revolution.
Gorillas, jaguars and an urban forest
Restoration flagships recognised by the UN have already helped species including mountain gorillas in East Africa, jaguars in Brazil, snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan and Ganges river dolphins in India.
Five new World Restoration Flagships were honoured at the launch: China’s Blue Bay Restoration Initiative, Colombia’s Urban Nature Reborn, Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley Renaissance, the Forestami urban forest project in Milan, Italy, and the Green Seattle Partnership in the United States.
UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said the world was witnessing one of the largest movements for nature in recorded history. But the head of the biodiversity convention, Astrid Schomaker, warned that nature cannot be fixed “with one hand while we destroy it with the other”.
What happens next
The report will feed into negotiations at COP17 in Yerevan, where countries are reviewing progress on the global biodiversity targets. The UN wants governments to move restoration of rivers, wetlands and coasts up the agenda and to find the extra finance needed by 2030. With five years left in the UN Decade, the message from its organisers is that restoration works, but it has to get a lot bigger, a lot faster.
Sources
- UN News: Nature is making a comeback (29 October 2026)
- YubaNet (UNEP press release): Nature is making a comeback, but the world must move faster to meet restoration targets (29 October 2026)
Featured image: photo by aiokr chen on Unsplash.
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