The international community has set ambitious goals for forest landscape restoration, but the limited progress to date suggests that accelerated actions must be taken at a large scale to meet these goals and – more urgently – to help keep the global temperature rise below
1.5 °C.
In recent decades, China has reversed a centuries-long trend of deforestation through several national-scale eco-forestry programs. Among these, the earliest and largest is the Three North Shelterbelt Program, which began in 1978 with a planning horizon of 73 years and a target of restoring more than 35 million hectares of degraded land. Nearly 86% of the target has already been achieved. This and other eco-forestry programs have increased forest cover in China from 8% in 1949 to 23% today.
David Cassells is researching China’s forest restoration programs. In this session, he will outline the lessons learned that could be applied elsewhere to scale up global efforts to restore degraded forest landscapes.
