Only a quarter of the area pledged for environmental restoration is being recovered, UN says
First global assessment, presented at the biodiversity COP17, finds 252 million hectares under restoration and funding far below what is needed.
Translated from the Portuguese original by the Panorama newsroom. Read in Portuguese
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Countries pledged to restore about 1 billion hectares of degraded ecosystems by 2030, but only a quarter of that area has documented actions. The data comes from a UN report presented on October 29, during the biodiversity COP17 in Yerevan, Armenia, as reported by g1.
According to the survey, the first of global scope on the subject, 252 million hectares are being restored in 149 countries. Rivers and oceans show less progress than forests. Asia concentrates most of the initiatives, led by China.
In South America, 5.4 million hectares are under restoration, 3.4 million of them in Brazil.
The document assesses the target of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls for at least 30% of degraded ecosystems to be under effective restoration by 2030. To get there, the UN calculates that actions need to triple.
Money is also insufficient: funding totaled US$ 64 billion in 2022, while US$ 296 billion a year would be needed through 2030. UNEP director Inger Andersen said the world is experiencing "one of the greatest movements in defense of nature," but still without the necessary scale and speed.