World can restore 150 million hectares of forests against cost of $85 billion per year

New analysis by IUCN estimates that restoring 150 million hectares would be worth US $85 billion per year to national and global economies. The new analysis shows that more than two billion hectares of the world's deforested and degraded landscapes, equivalent to half the size of Asia, offer opportunities for restoration.
This new global estimate is almost double the area previously considered restorable, thanks to improvements in the precision of mapping zones where climate and soils allow forests to grow.
The restoration of lost forests will increase carbon stocks and result in healthy and resilient ecosystems, which will provide the multiple goods and services people need, and lead to an increase in biodiversity, said President of IUCN Ashok Khoshla.
The 150 million hectare restoration target directly relates to existing international commitments on climate change and biodiversity.
It will contribute to the biodiversity convention target calling for restoration of 15 percent of degraded ecosystems by 2020, and the climate change convention goal on REDD-Plus, which calls for countries to slow, halt and reverse the loss and degradation of forests.
With preliminary analysis showing the value of restoring 150 million hectares to be US $85 billion per year, forest landscape restoration can be seen as offering the world a highly cost-effective way to combat climate change, create new jobs and contribute to rural development and livelihoods. Earlier this year, IUCN expressed its support of Rwanda's historic announcement to restore the country's degraded landscapes border-to-border, predicting that it could be the beginning of the biggest restoration initiative the world has ever seen.
What is needed urgently is a country-by-country assessment of how this commitment could be achieved in line with national economic development and conservation priorities, said the IUCN official.
According to an IUCN communication, a core commitment to restore 150 million hectares of lost forests and degraded lands world-wide by 2020 was launched Friday at a ministerial conference in Bonn.
At the Bonn Challenge Ministerial Roundtable, a select group of ministers and chief executives of international and non-government organisations and companies are discussing how to benefit biodiversity and the fight against climate change through concrete restoration activities.
"Recognising that national circumstances vary enormously, this core commitment to restore 150 million hectares is a robust and realistic response to the global assessment," said IUCNs Global Director of Environment and Development Stewart Maginnis.
IUCN, that acts as co-ordinator of the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration (GPFLR), has also carried out a new global restoration assessment of two billion hectares in collaboration with World Resources Institute (WRI) and South Dakota State University (SDSU) for GPFLR in preparation for the Bonn Challenge event.
The estimate of restoring 150 million ha being worth US $85 billion per year is made by IUCN and this is based on the currently available information.
According to IUCN official, "our best notional estimate of the gross returns to restoring 150 million hectares of degraded forestland world-wide is in the order of 85 billion USD (2010) per year, or 570/ha-yr USD (2010) (low=163/ha; high= 996/ha)."
Despite substantial regional variation, IUCN analysis suggests that on average a bit more than one half of this value is in stored carbon (low= 12 percent; high= 72 percent) and a bit less than half is due to wood and non-wood forest products (low = 28 percent; high = 88 percent).
This estimate also reflects a lack of recreational and passive use value information that can be reasonably assigned and summed on a per hectare basis.
The estimate adopts the modelling assumptions of Chiabai et al., 2010, and distributes forest restoration proportionately based on current global geographic and five forest type distributions such that a bit more than one third of the restored lands are located in Russia, a bit less than one third of the restored lands are in Brazil and the final third distributed across the rest of the world (for example, 10 percent Asia; 9 percent Africa).