Humanity needs to restore 350 million hectares of degraded land by 2030 during the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, but hitting that target will depend on people who have the skills to do the work.
Among the skill sets that matter: technical know-how to implement projects on the ground, the ability to bring stakeholders along with evidence rather than assumptions, and the skills to make restoration efforts more inclusive of who participates and benefits.
Landscape Academy, the free e-learning platform from Landscape Alliance and the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), offers self-paced online courses covering that ground – from practice to process to people.
If you’re looking to hone your skills in landscape restoration, here are three courses worth checking out.
1. Agroforestry for implementers in the Great Green Wall region: A free online agroforestry course
10+ hours, self-paced
Trees protect crops, feed animals, and give families food, fuel, and income. This free online course shows you how to put agroforestry into practice and help bring dry land back to life across the Great Green Wall region.
Built with direct input from agroforestry practitioners working across the region, it’s designed for the people who actually do this work: extension workers, NGO and project staff, technical staff, trainers, teachers, students and researchers.
Rather than a single recipe, the course teaches you how to work alongside farmers and communities to choose what works for each place.
That means recognizing different agroforestry systems and selecting the right trees and practices together with the people who will grow them, then helping communities raise healthy trees from seed through planting and protection, restore soil and water, manage grazing and strengthen tree-based livelihoods.
It offers two self-paced learning pathways:
- Certificate pathway: Modules unlock in sequence, with a certificate awarded on completion.
- Non-certificate pathway: A library-style format where you pick the modules most relevant to your restoration project, in any order.
Find this free course in the Landscape Academy library, in English or French.
2. Stakeholder engagement with evidence: A free online course for landscape governance
4+ hours, self-paced
A restoration project can have all the right technical inputs and still stall without buy-in. Decision making in landscapes is only getting more complex: competing land uses, environmental degradation, the climate crisis and shifting social and policy contexts all demand more than technical solutions alone.
This free online course, launched as part of the K4GGWA (Knowledge for the Great Green Wall Alliance) initiative, introduces the SHARED approach (stakeholder approach to risk-informed and evidence-based decision making), developed by Landscape Alliance to combine stakeholder engagement, systems thinking and diverse forms of evidence into collaborative, adaptive decision making.
It’s aimed at practitioners, policymakers, researchers, facilitators, development professionals, and community leaders working across landscapes, natural resource management, climate action, restoration, agriculture, conservation, and sustainable development, the connective layer between technical implementation and the people affected by it.
Find this course in the Landscape Academy library, in English or French.
3. Gender and social inclusion in forest landscape restoration: a free online course on equity in restoration
2–4 hours, self-paced
An estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide depend on forests and tree-based landscapes for their livelihoods and well-being, but access to, control over, and benefits from these resources are not distributed equally.
This free online course rounds out the set by looking at who gets to participate in a restoration project and who benefits from it – exploring how power relations, social norms and institutional structures shape restoration outcomes.
It’s designed for restoration practitioners, policymakers, researchers, development professionals, community leaders and students working on forest landscape restoration, and it covers practical tools and approaches for promoting more equitable decision making in restoration initiatives.
Find this course in the Landscape Academy library, alongside the other two.
Worked through in sequence, from implementation to engagement to inclusion, these three free online courses each add a piece worth having for anyone involved in landscape restoration work.
Ready to start learning? Head to landscapeacademy.org, create a free account, and begin any of these self-paced courses, and more, today.
