Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene 2014 Sept - Oct Vol. 9 No.5 | Page 27

Environment
these partners are inventing technologies that will provide
new products and services for households, entrepreneurs,
and governments looking to reduce the levels of untreated
waste in their communities.
If you don’t pick the right things to focus on and measure,
you’re not going to get the results you’re looking for.
As we, the global community, finalize our plans for the
post-2015 SDGs, let’s make sure that we pick the right
indicators and choose the right targets. And then let’s
empower the entire sanitation sector with the tools to
measure and meet those aggressive targets. That’s how we
will save lives and unlock amazing human potential.
About the author
Brian Arbogast leads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s
effort to bring groundbreaking innovations in sanitation
technology. Arbogast was previously a corporate vice president
at Microsoft Corporation, leading an international portfolio
of research and development projects. More recently, he
concentrated in cleantech and international development,
driving market solutions to address some of the world’s most
pressing challenges.

New Collaboration Launched
to Restore the World’s Forests
United Nations Environment Programme and
International Union for Conservation of Nature
join forces to restore forest ecosystems

Photograph: Dunes and Pine Forest, Coto Doñana National Park, Spain/Peter
Prokosch/UNEP GRID Arendal

E

fforts to combat climate change and improve
livelihoods by restoring forest lands continue to
build momentum. A new collaboration is being launched
between the United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) and the International Union for Conservation
of Nature (IUCN) to restore at least 150 million hectares
of forest landscapes by 2020, leading up to the SecretaryGeneral’s Climate Summit on 23 September 2014.
The new collaboration will bring together two major
ongoing global initiatives to restore degraded landscapes
worldwide - the UN Collaborative Programme on
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (the UN-REDD Programme) and its 55
partner countries, and the Global Partnership on Forest
Landscape Restoration .

Restoring 150 million hectares of degraded forest
landscapes, an area roughly the size of Alaska or almost
half the size of India, would sequester an estimated
1 gigatonne of carbon dioxide equivalent from the
atmosphere every year, reducing the current emissions gap
by 11-17 per cent.
The new collaboration between UNEP and IUCN aims to
contribute to the implementation of the Bonn Challenge,
, a global commitment made in September 2011 to restore
at least 150 million hectares of degraded forest landscapes
by 2020, which would generate an estimated US$85 billion
per year in ecosystem services to benefit the rural poor in
developing countries.
With policy support from governments, forest landscape
restoration is an attractive proposition to harness private
sector investments. Restoring degraded lands benefits
biodiversity and generates ecosystem services such as
water purification, wood for energy, pollination for
agriculture, and tourism enterprise opportunities.
The agreement includes a Helpdesk function for
assessments of restoration opportunities, and a global
mapping database for carbon and non-carbon benefits
of restoration efforts. It will also include efforts to align
forest restoration with benefits under the global climate
change mitigation initiative REDD+, which focuses on
developing countries.
“This collaboration will add new momentum to a mission
of great significance to UNEP, by strengthening a critical
dimension of REDD+, which aims to reduce emissions
from deforestation and forest degradation in developing
countries. The economic and environmental importance
of forests means that we cannot just prevent their
destruction, we must also unite efforts to recover this lifesupporting resource,” said Mette L. Wilkie, Director of
Environmental Policy Implementation at UNEP.
To date, up to 20 million hectares of restoration
commitments to the Bonn Challenge have been pledged
by 5 countries and alliances. Additional pledges are
expected during the Secretary-General’s Climate Summit,
and the collaboration between IUCN and UNEP will
encourage more countries to make pledges towards the
150 million hectare target.
The collaboration will eventually benefit all 55 partner
countries which UNEP is working with, through the
UN-REDD Programme; although restoration is a higher
priority for some countries than for others. National
efforts will initially focus on a few pilot projects including
countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Indonesia. In
Cote d’Ivoire, for example, recent conflict and civil war has
destroyed most of the current forest landscapes, and the
country is in need of a massive investment for landscape
restoration, as described in its National Programme under
the UN-REDD Programme.
Source: UNEP
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