Investing in landscape restoration is key to help the world meet the 1.5°C climate target.
Increasing investments will require making the case for restoration projects - and showing they work.
Here are four ways to set-up the infrastructure for transparency, trust and investment.

Around the world, 3.2 billion people are affected by degraded landscapes, land that has lost some degree of its natural productivity due to human-caused processes. Restoring these landscapes can improve community resilience and enhance local livelihoods.

Restoration initiatives also hold the potential to deliver nearly 30% of the mitigation needed to attain the 1.5°C climate target, and nature’s contribution to the global economy is worth more than $125 trillion annually.

So why is investment in landscape restoration so sorely lacking?
Biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis

To date, conservation and restoration investments have fallen short of the actions needed to combat the biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis. There has been a 68% average drop in global wildlife populations since 1970, with growing numbers of species going extinct, known as the six mass extinction. These declines are largely driven by land-use changes, particularly the destruction of habitats. At the same time, climate change, land degradation and deforestation have caused tropical forests to absorb a third less carbon than they did in the 1990s.

While governments and small-scale donations play a major role in conserving and restoring landscapes, spurring additional investment will require engaging the private sector. The first step to inspire business action is making the case for investment. However, companies – and society at large – need assurances that their money is being spent on credible interventions that have lasting results. By demonstrating how and why interventions succeed or fail, the groundwork can be laid for replication at scale and in new geographies.
How to show investments work

Rapid advances in geospatial monitoring could provide a framework that promotes investor trust. Frequent, high-resolution time-lapsed imagery are becoming less costly and more accessible, allowing more initiatives to use these tools to verify that projects are being undertaken as planned. Historically, such technology has been harnessed by the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch, which provides weekly high-resolution alerts to policymakers and companies spotlighting the specific location of deforestation. Transparency propels action.

While forest loss has been effectively monitored on a global scale for years, forest restoration is a longer process, and its monitoring has not yet received the same level of investment.

So why is investment in landscape restoration so sorely lacking?
Biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis

To date, conservation and restoration investments have fallen short of the actions needed to combat the biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis. There has been a 68% average drop in global wildlife populations since 1970, with growing numbers of species going extinct, known as the six mass extinction. These declines are largely driven by land-use changes, particularly the destruction of habitats. At the same time, climate change, land degradation and deforestation have caused tropical forests to absorb a third less carbon than they did in the 1990s.

While governments and small-scale donations play a major role in conserving and restoring landscapes, spurring additional investment will require engaging the private sector. The first step to inspire business action is making the case for investment. However, companies – and society at large – need assurances that their money is being spent on credible interventions that have lasting results. By demonstrating how and why interventions succeed or fail, the groundwork can be laid for replication at scale and in new geographies.