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Countries favour risky tree-planting schemes over protecting, restoring and sustainably managing the forests we already have standing, with research showing national carbon plans requiring a land area larger than the size of the US, or almost four times the land area of India. A new study released today is the first to calculate that countries collectively need a total of 1.2 billion…

To reverse the persistent trend of biodiversity loss to recovery of nature, nature policy needs to be combined with policies on climate mitigation, and food and energy systems must be reformed. This is one of the conclusions in the report Exploring nature-positive pathways. The report explores various pathways to achieve global goals for biodiversity, from a global perspective. The study shows…

Peatlands are unique and rare ecosystems that, despite only covering around 3-4% of the planet’s land surface, they contain up to one-third of the world’s soil carbon, which is twice the amount of carbon as found in the world’s forests. Keeping this carbon locked away is absolutely critical to achieving global climate goals. However, about 12% of current peatlands have been drained and degraded,…

Forest and land degradation affects almost 2 billion hectares (ha) of land and threatens the livelihoods, well-being, food, water and energy security of nearly 3.2 billion people. Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is a relatively recent response to address these impacts and aims to recover the ecological functionality and enhance human well-being in deforested and degraded…

This report aims at inspiring strategic thinking and actions to transform agrifood systems towards a sustainable, resilient and inclusive future, by building on both previous reports in the same series as well as on a comprehensive corporate strategic foresight exercise that also nurtured FAO Strategic Framework 2022–31.  It analyses major drivers of agrifood systems and explores how their trends…

Black soils are carbon-rich and highly fertile soils known as the world's food basket due to the variability of crops they sustain. For decades, these fertile soils have been widely cultivated and have played a key role in global agricultural production of cereals, tuber crops, oilseed, pastures, and forage systems. In addition, black soils play an important role on climate change mitigation and…