A pilot project in Chile explores how to ensure that farmers are properly rewarded for managing their land and livestock in ways that safeguard supplies of clean drinking water to users further downstream.*

Restoration in Niger and neighbouring countries has helped to “re-green” vast areas of rural West Africa with impressive results for agriculture and livelihoods – and at very low cost.*

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration involves restoring degraded lands at large scale by harnessing the self-interest of smallholder farmers themselves. It involves the systematic regrowth and management of trees and shrubs from felled tree stumps, sprouting root systems or seeds.

Five years of afforestation and restoration in Turkey have dramatically extended tree cover, reduced the land’s vulnerability to erosion, helped combat global warming and greened thousands of public spaces.*

Turkey faces a high level of land degradation and erosion due to topography, climate change and improper agricultural practices, over-destruction of range and forest lands and the sensitivity of many areas to erosion. Frequent flooding has claimed lives and property. Run-off in some of the watersheds is irregular and water quality is low in degraded landscapes.

Teaching and helping farmers to integrate trees into their lands is integral to a restoration project in a district of Rwanda that supplies most of the water used in the capital city*

Building on years of experience with sustainable land and agro-ecosystem management activities in Rulindo district, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations provided support to 276 farmers.

Pig-rearing, essential oils, fruit trees and beekeeping: establishing additional sources of income has been key to a restoration project on the biodiversity-rich island of Madagascar.*

Forest loss and degradation have plagued Madagascar’s unique biological diversity. Direct causes include slash-and-burn agriculture for subsistence crops. As a result, the island’s evergreen forest is severely fragmented. While tree planting had occurred in the past, it centred on exotic species with limited social and ecological benefits.

A private company is restoring degraded forest reserves in Ghana with commercial as well as native tree species, applying a business model that also brings strong community and environmental benefits.*

The company, Form Ghana, has leased about 20,000 hectares in three forest reserves in the West Africa country in order to establish and manage sustainable forest plantations. These areas were once productive semi-deciduous forest ecosystems. However, decades of overexploitation, bush fires and conversion to agricultural land left them severely degraded.

After a quarter-century of restoration in a heavily degraded river basin in Costa Rica, a “model forest” platform is helping a local foundation to promote the benefits of its work and boost business in an economically depressed region.*

The area surrounding the headwaters of the Nosara River, which flows from the highlands of the Nicoya Peninsula into the Pacific Ocean, suffered deforestation under a past government policy that encouraged large-scale land clearing for agriculture and cattle ranching.

Farmers in poor rural areas of Guatemala are learning how agroforestry incorporating the culturally important breadnut tree can boost their nutrition and income as well as restoring degraded land through deforestation*.

In a pilot project, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations assisted 38 smallholder families in Petén, the northernmost department of Guatemala, to become “restoration farmers.” Their plots will serve as demonstration sites for efforts to scale up the initiative to the regional level.

The objective of the India Ecosystem Services Project (ESIP), which is under preparation, is to improve forest quality, land management, and nontimber forest produce (NTFP) benefits for forest dependent communities in selected landscapes in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It is designed to enhance the outcomes of the national Green India Mission, which targets improving the quality of forests in about 5 million hectares.

This project aims to strengthen the National Protected Areas System and to support sustainable land use and restoration practices in selected areas of the Dry Corridor of Nicaragua, in order to foster biodiversity conservation, resilient landscapes, and local livelihoods.

The five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) are among the Europe and Central Asia Region’s most vulnerable to climate change; building resilience is thus a priority for poverty reduction and shared prosperity in Central Asia. Such impacts are already being felt and are expected to intensify, with the agriculture, energy, and water sectors most at risk.

Desertification in arid and semiarid areas of Northwest China is a major current environmental issue for the country, caused by the interaction of a naturally dry climate, recurrent periods of prolonged droughts, anthropogenic factors over long periods of time, and specific topographic and geographic conditions. Among the anthropogenic factors are poor land management, inadequate farming techniques and over-cultivation, overgrazing and the removal of natural vegetation; misuse of water resources; and poor environmental and ecosystem management.