UN report: 252 million hectares of nature under restoration, but far short of target

A level the UN calls new but insufficient

The United Nations said on Thursday, 29 October 2026, that 252 million hectares of nature are now being restored in 149 countries, a level it describes as new but still insufficient. The 99-page report was published during the COP17 biodiversity conference in Armenia, which runs to the end of the week in Yerevan. It was prepared by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Doreen Robinson, deputy director of UNEP's ecosystems division in Nairobi, welcomed the effort as the largest restoration operation ever recorded. Sources put the 252 million hectares at roughly the size of Algeria.

Where the restoration is taking place

Most of the effort is on land, covering 232 million hectares, against 11 million hectares of inland waters and 5.7 million hectares of marine and coastal areas. The report says land restoration has already reached half of its goal, while freshwater, marine and coastal ecosystems lag well behind their targets and are degrading at a particularly rapid pace. China leads by a wide margin. Le Temps and La Libre report 137 million hectares for China, ahead of Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia, whereas De Standaard gives 127.4 million hectares of active restoration, roughly half of the global area. The sources differ on that figure, so both numbers are shown as reported.

Terrestrial232

Inland waters11

Marine and coastal5.7

Terrestrial

232 million hectares

Inland waters

11 million hectares

Marine and coastal

5.7 million hectares

Data from the article text

What remains to be done

The benchmark is about one billion hectares, and the authors estimate that the pace of efforts must triple to reach it. Financing must rise sharply, particularly from the private sector. Restoration funding is currently 64 billion dollars and is expected to reach 296 billion dollars by 2030. The work also creates jobs: one million have already been created, with a target of 32 million by 2030. According to research cited in the report, restoring 15% of priority areas could store the equivalent of 30% of the CO2 added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and help avoid 60% of species extinctions.

Current funding64

Expected by 2030296

Current funding

64 billion USD

Expected by 2030

296 billion USD

Data from the article text

Flagship projects

The UN named five flagship projects. The most notable is China's Blue bay restoration initiative, which protects and restores mangroves, coastal marshes, seagrass beds, coral reefs and 2,000 kilometres of coastline, and aims to give more than 135 threatened species suitable habitat again. China's Shan-shui project, whose name means mountains and water in Mandarin, was launched in 2016 and includes 75 restoration projects across rivers, forests, lakes, grasslands, deserts, farmland and urban areas. The other flagships are in the marshes of Colombia, the cloud forest of Ethiopia, the vertical gardens of Milan in Italy and the planting of 1.5 million trees in Seattle. The report also cites results for mountain gorillas in East Africa, jaguars in Brazil, snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan and Ganges dolphins in India.

The UN response

Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, described the effort as one of the largest movements in favour of nature in history, but warned that nature is not yet being restored at the scale or speed required. She called for initiatives to become systemic actions that build a restoration economy by 2030. The report comes at the midpoint of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which runs from 2021 to 2030 and builds on the Kunming-Montreal framework adopted in 2022, which seeks to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030.