Land, like water, is a vital and globally-important resource. Healthy soils create jobs, raise incomes, and increase food security. The land can also help preserve biodiversity and slow climate change by storing atmospheric carbon that would otherwise warm the Earth.
This is why the practice of sustainable land management — using resources from the land while ensuring it remains healthy — is so important. Already, some 40 percent of the Earth’s land area is substantially degraded. This affects more than 3 billion people globally, especially in rural areas where healthy lands are needed for farming livelihoods and food production.
To date, GEF-supported projects focused on land restoration have benefited 80 million smallholder farmers and resulted in 143 million hectares of land being managed more sustainably. These efforts will continue to be scaled up as part of GEF efforts to support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, aiming to reverse the decline of the natural world over the next 10 years.
Time is short for this transition. Restoring degraded lands requires us to work together in new ways, across many geographies and sectors.