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The United Nations declared the 2021-2030 Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. It is also the deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals and the timeline scientists have identified as the last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The UN Decade is, therefore, a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems all around the world, for the benefit of people and nature. The global movement – led by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – will build political momentum for restoration, as well as thousands of initiatives on the ground, aiming to halt the degradation of ecosystems and restore them to achieve global goals.

Facing this challenge, IIS´ executive director Bernardo Strassburg was invited to join the UN Decade Science Task Force as the terrestrial ecosystems specialist. Convened as a pillar of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the technical body will deliver a foundational think-piece on ecosystem restoration as well as support the strong science throughout the Decade. The Task Force will establish a baseline understanding of ecosystem restoration from which all partners involved in the UN Decade can build pathways of action.

As one of the Decade partners, IIS will provide an integrated and consistent modelling of land-use scenarios for conservation and restoration and their outcomes for multiple goals. It will support the process of developing the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework – a global, outcome-oriented framework for the development of national, subnational and regional goals and targets that will also facilitate regular monitoring and review of progress at the global level. IIS will contribute to ensure that the definition of the goals, their needed actions and corresponding impacts are based on the most novel scientific solutions and data.

The scenarios and their respective outcomes are being generated by IIS´s integrated modelling tool – PLANGEA –  that has been improved to incorporate more variables and data (ie. provision of ecosystem services and ecosystems integrity). The work is being developed in continuous interaction with the Co-Chairs of the OEWG and the Secretariat of the CBD, in order to provide relevant and timely inputs for negotiations.

The launch of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration will also celebrate the World Environment Day through several events hosted by UNEP and the Decade partners.