More than two billion hectares of land are degraded worldwide, including land in the Sahel. To address this challenge, Forest and Landscape Restoration aims to transform degraded or barren lands into healthy and fertile landscapes where local communities, ecosystems and other stakeholders can co-exist within the framework of Sustainable Land Management (SLM).

In the Sahel, populations depend heavily on the exploitation of natural resources: extensive pastoralism, rainfed food crops, collection of non-timber forest products for food / pharmacopoeia and firewood for cooking. These natural resources are subject to strong biophysical pressures including low and erratic rains, high temperatures, high aridity, and often poor and easily degradable soils. These pressures are exacerbated by anthropogenic pressures such as a demographic boom, climate change, insecurity, and weak governance.

In recent years, initiatives have been introduced globally to implement FLR/SLM techniques, in a more holistic manner and with increased means to intervene on a large scale. In this context, the French Global Environment Facility (FFEM) and other co-financing partners (EU-funded Action Against Desertification Project, Korea Forest Service, the Forest Ecosystem Restoration Initiative led by CBD, and the French Agency for Development) have agreed to collaborate on the following specific objectives relating to planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Forest and Landscape Restoration both at the Communal, national, sub-regional and global levels (total budget € 6.5 million).

Starting in November 2017, for a four-year period, FAO’s FLR Mechanism will carry out the management and implementation of the project at country level in three communes in Burkina-Faso and three communes in Niger.
The aim of the project is to contribute to the implementation of FLR/SLM in a holistic way, in order to sustainably provide multiple social, economic and environmental goods and services and achieve neutrality in terms of land degradation by 2030. It will support:

• Local actions to implement FLR/SLM in an innovative and decentralized way with a strong ownership of the local stakeholders within the framework of the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the SaheI Initiative (GGWSSI)
• Sub-regional actions to support mainly FLR planning, biophysical and socio-economic assessment of impacts, and monitoring of FLR efforts and to facilitate sub-regional knowledge capitalization / dissemination
• Global actions to develop  innovative financing solutions in the context of the new Land Degradation Neutrality Fund and to showcase project results in global FLR knowledge platforms

For more information on this project, please contact the FLRM team at: [email protected]