According to the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration (GPFLR), more than 2 billion hectares (ha) of the world's deforested and degraded landscapes have potential for forest and landscape restoration (FLR). Nowadays, deforestation and landscape degradation represent global issues: around 13 million ha of forest were converted to other land uses or lost through natural causes each year from 2000 to 2010. Continued landscape degradation poses serious obstacles to eliminating poverty and hunger, maintaining biodiversity, and it makes difficult for farmers and local communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change. This process of land degradation also increases competition for scarce natural resources and thus threatens people’s livelihoods, well-being, food, water and energy security and the resilience capacity of both people and natural ecosystems.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) established the Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism (FLRM) during the 22nd Session of the Committee on Forestry (COFO) in June 2014. The FLRM is built on the advantages of a UN Agency with expertise and experience in several of the land-use sectors and its extensive network of country, subregional and regional offices.

The FLRM aims at scaling-up, monitoring and reporting on FLR activities to contribute to the Bonn Challenge and Aichi Biodiversity targets. It helps to coordinate and facilitate the development and implementation of projects, programmes and related activities in FAO member countries, in full collaboration with other key actors. The FLRM operates globally by developing financial intelligence functions (raising awareness on FLR and fundraising actions towards key donors), preparing guidelines and standards for baselines and verification of successful efforts and contributing to more effective reporting to the Rio Conventions.

As a milestone of implementing FLR in selected countries, the FLRM supports the preparation and the implementation of national FLR action plans in each selected country in accordance with its own laws, regulations and policy framework as well as other relevant initiatives and programmes. To scale-up the FLR efforts within countries and from country to regional and global level, as well as to ensure sustainability of FLR efforts, the FLRM operates to promote networking and support partnerships on FLR, striving for increased intersectoral collaboration. It also explores investment opportunities and greater involvement of the private sector to develop appropriate value chains linked to FLR opportunities.

In order to achieve successful restoration efforts, the FLRM works in full collaboration with the GPFLR, other key partners and participating countries and contributes to national and international commitments and processes, especially those related to multilateral environmental agreements such as the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).