The webinar “Ecosystem Restoration: Best practices for capacity development, knowledge and learning”, hosted by the Task Force on Best Practices (TFBP), took place on 23 June 2023.

The TFBP, led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), organized this webinar to improve knowledge sharing and capacity development throughout the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 (hereafter UN Decade). The goal was to encourage North American-based restoration experts to share knowledge with the global restoration community by providing detailed guidance on how to register restoration initiatives and document good practices using the Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring (FERM) platform. The webinar also showcased FERM's search engine tool, allowing users to consult and access documented good practices from different platforms. In addition, the webinar included a presentation on the summary report of the Standards of Practice to Guide Ecosystem Restoration.

The event was moderated by James Obata – Communications Officer at FAO – who presented the day’s agenda and overall scope of the webinar.

The welcoming remarks came from Jocelyn Brown – Director of the Liaison Office for FAO North America – who gave a brief introduction, including the latest news on the UN Decade as pertains to a North American audience. There must be a shared vision of ecosystem restoration and the principles that underpin it, as well as clear standards for what constitutes best practices. While the UN Decade was happy to receive a wide variety of nominations of restoration flagship initiatives, there was a significant lack of North American candidates. The hope was that this webinar could help promote research and initiatives in ecosystem restoration in the United States of America and Canada to put these projects "on the map".

Christophe Besacier – Senior Forestry Officer and Co-ordinator of the Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism (FLRM) at FAO, as well as TFBP Co-leader – presented an overview of the UN Decade. This overview included the vision, organizational structure and most recent action plan for the UN Decade (from April 2023). He also recapped how World Restoration Flagships were created, with over 150 expressions of interest and 73 government-endorsed nominations. The TFBP and Science Task Force of the UN Decade then assessed these submissions, and the first 10 flagships were awarded at the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP15) in December 2022. He also introduced the role, achievements and ongoing efforts of the TFBP, including its most recent publications: the summary report of the Standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration and the Capacity, Knowledge and Learning Action Plan for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Dr Cara R. Nelson – Lead of the Ecosystem Restoration Thematic Group, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Commission on Ecosystem Management (CEM), and Professor at the University of Montana – outlined the Standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration. She presented the differences and similarities between ecological restoration and ecosystem restoration, and explained the 10 principles that underpin ecosystem restoration. She then provided an overview of the 250+ recommended practices included in the Standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration and organized through five main components and 45 sub-components of the restoration process. The Standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration are the joint effort of 24 authors between 18 different organizations to guide ecosystem restoration projects on the application of the 10 principles of the Decade. The final version will be launched in September at the 10th World Conference on Ecological Restoration in Darwin, Australia.

Andrea Romero and Cristiane Sater Melnik – Facilitators on the TFBP and Consultants with the FLRM – presented the framework for collecting and disseminating good practices throughout the UN Decade. Ms Romero began by explaining that the framework is integrated into the FERM, which was was established to track global progress and disseminate good practices for the UN Decade, as well as to report areas under restoration for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework Target 2. After a broad definition of good practices of ecosystem restoration, she gave an overview of the two main objectives of the framework: i) documenting good practices derived from restoration initiatives registered in FERM; and ii) disseminating good practices collected by collaborating platforms (FERM Registry, The World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies [WOCAT], LIFE GoProFor and PANORAMA - Solutions for a Healthy Planet). Ms Sater Melnik then gave a live, interactive demonstration of the of the step-by-step process involved in registering a restoration initiative and documenting good practices through the FERM Registry. Additionally, she presented the FERM’s search engine tool, now freely accessible online, which enables users to explore over 1 500 good restoration practices collected from the collaborating platforms and filter them according to their specific needs. Following the FERM demonstration, there was a session where participants were able to pose a variety of questions to the panel experts.

Christophe Besacier then gave his closing remarks, stating that this should be considered a starting point, as the Standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration and FERM will set the stage to undertake effective efforts to restore ecosystems worldwide. He concluded by mentioning how the UN Decade still has many goals and achievements on the horizon until 2030, describing the across-the-board participation and collaboration in this high-impact initiative.

Watch the recording of the session here.

For more information, please contact [email protected].

Task Force on Best Practices