Nearly 25 percent of the world’s total land area suffers from degradation. Restoring these landscapes can provide a wide range of benefits, including food security, biodiversity conservation, enhanced local incomes and cleaner water. Recognizing this, several global and regional initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration on Forests, AFR100 in Africa and Initiative 20×20 in Latin America, have committed to restoring millions of hectares of land by 2030.
But restoration is complex: each landscape has a different set of needs, actors and natural conditions. Transforming these large-scale restoration commitments into project-level implementation requires thorough planning, complete with clear pathways, tools and guidance.
The Restoration Launchpad, the guidebook from WRI, presents a step-by-step process for planning and implementing a landscape approach to restoration projects. It identifies the five essential stages of every project: Scope, Design, Finance, Implement, and Monitor. Each stage is outlined with key steps and a checklist to help planners track their progress and ensure that each topic has been taken into consideration. These checklists can be adapted and implemented by planners and practitioners in a variety of ecosystems, including grasslands, pasturelands, farmlands, coastal zones, wetlands, and peatlands.
