Expert workshop

FAO Headquarters, Rome, 26-29 April 2016

Background and rationale

Countries worldwide demonstrate a growing concern with regard to land degradation. Over the past years, a number of international agreements, initiatives and countries’ commitments to stop degrading land and promote restoration and sustainable management of landscapes have been endorsed, such as the SDGs, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration on Forests, the Land Degradation Neutrality target, the 20x20 Initiative or the African Union Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative.

An emerging concept which is gaining momentum across the globe and plays a significant role to catalyze restoration of degraded lands is Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR). FLR looks at the rehabilitation of degraded lands within the landscape – the heterogeneous mosaic of different land uses across a large area of land or a watershed. To accompany that effort, FAO launched the FLR Mechanism in 2014 to support countries in meeting their restoration commitments, including assistance on monitoring and reporting efforts at national, regional and international scales.

At the request of member countries and in collaboration with a wide range of partners, FAO launched the Drylands Restoration Initiative (DRI) with the aim of capturing, monitoring and sharing knowledge gained in dryland restoration initiatives worldwide. Further to this, in January 2015 FAO, together with the World Resources Institute (WRI), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the funding support from the European Union/ACP, organized the first Drylands Monitoring Week under the theme “Monitoring and Assessment of Drylands: Forests, Rangelands, Trees and Agrosilvopastoral Systems” that led to the Rome Promise on Monitoring and Assessment of Drylands for Sustainable Management and Restoration.