Land models sprout as degradation threatens billions of livelihoods
Restoration at Scale: Three Land-Recovery Projects Earn Global Recognition as Degradation Crisis Deepens
Qinilo.com – Nearly two-fifths of Earth’s terrestrial surface is now degraded or locked in drought cycles, a condition that puts the daily survival of more than three billion people at risk. Against that backdrop, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) handed out its World Restoration Flagships awards on Wednesday, spotlighting three large-scale land-recovery programmes that collectively target close to five million hectares of rehabilitation by 2030 — a footprint comparable to roughly seven million football pitches laid end to end.
The ceremony took place during the UNCCD’s plenary session in Mongolia, where delegates gathered from 17 to 28 August. Yasmine Fouad, head of the convention, framed the awards not as symbolic gestures but as proof-of-concept for a strategy she insists the world can no longer afford to postpone.
“These [programmes] show that restoration works. They demonstrate that investing in nature strengthens resilience, supports livelihoods and delivers tangible benefits for people and communities.”
Fouad stressed that the conversation around degraded soils, vanishing ecosystems, and recurring drought has shifted decisively away from a purely environmental framing. In her assessment, these pressures now sit at the centre of food-system stability, freshwater availability, and macroeconomic security — challenges that demand coordinated state and multilateral action rather than isolated conservation projects.
Sahel: Turning Conflict-Scarred Land Back to Use
Stretching across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, the Sahel Integrated Resilience Initiative has operated since 2018 under the leadership of the World Food Programme. The region’s ecosystems have been battered simultaneously by armed conflict, prolonged dry spells, overgrazing, and accelerating climate variability. Yet the programme has already rehabilitated more than 335,000 hectares of farmland and rangeland, directly strengthening food security and household income for over four million residents.
Field monitoring compiled to date indicates that 75 per cent of the initiative’s designated reliance sites have registered measurable gains in soil structure and vegetation cover. Equally significant, the share of households requiring humanitarian food assistance in those same areas fell by approximately eleven per cent during the most recent lean season — a statistic that links ecological recovery to reduced dependency on emergency aid.
The programme’s 2030 targets call for restoring an additional 470,000 hectares, enhancing local biodiversity, and sequestering up to twenty million tonnes of carbon dioxide in regrown biomass and soils.
Saudi Arabia: Greening a Desert Kingdom
In a country where arable land is scarce and water is the binding constraint, the National Greening Programme represents an ambitious attempt to reverse decades of desertification. Saudi Arabia’s overarching national ambition is to restore forty million hectares across rangelands, forests, desert tracts, urban zones, and coastal ecosystems by 2100, while planting ten billion trees within the same timeframe.
Progress to date includes bringing one million hectares of degraded terrain under active restoration and putting 159 million trees into the ground. Toolbox elements range from conventional reforestation and natural regeneration to controlled grazing regimes, reintroduction of native wildlife, rainwater harvesting infrastructure, and the recycling of treated wastewater to irrigate restoration plots in water-scarce landscapes.
The nearer-term milestone — restoring 2.5 million hectares and planting 215 million trees by 2030 — is projected to generate as many as 187,000 jobs while measurably improving urban air quality in cities that have long struggled with dust and particulate pollution.
Brazil’s Cerrado: Saving the World’s Most Biodiverse Savanna
The Cerrado biome occupies roughly a quarter of Brazil’s total land area and harbours the highest species richness of any tropical savannah on Earth. Large-scale conversion to soybean and cattle pasture, compounded by shifting rainfall patterns, has stripped more than half of its original native vegetation. The consequences ripple outward: Indigenous Peoples’ territorial rights are eroded, regional food-production capacity declines, and watershed functions that once buffered downstream communities from flooding and drought are weakened.
The Restoring Brazil’s Cerrado Savannah initiative convenes more than 180 partners working across nine states. Its methods combine natural regeneration, direct seeding, assisted restoration, and agroforestry systems built around native species. To date the programme has placed over 27,000 hectares under active restoration and drawn on seed stock from more than 150 native plant taxa.
The stated endpoint is restoration of two million hectares by 2030 — a figure that, if met, would represent one of the largest single-biome recovery operations ever attempted in the tropics.
The Broader Stakes
The three award recipients together illustrate a principle the UN has been pressing since the adoption of its global land-restoration target: one billion hectares of degraded land brought back into productive, ecologically functional use by 2030. Achieving that number will require not only technical know-how but sustained financing, political will, and community-level buy-in across dozens of sovereign states.
What distinguishes the programmes honoured this week is their scale and their integration of livelihood outcomes with ecological recovery. They are, in Fouad’s framing, evidence that the restoration pathway is not merely aspirational — it is operational, measurable, and already delivering returns to the people who depend on healthy land for food, water, and income.
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