WE SCALE
LANDSCAPE SCALE RESTORATION?
Landscape scale restoration is a holistic approach that integrates environmental, social and economic concerns within the restoration framework.
Restoration traditionally focuses on relatively small projects that are easy to conceptualize, fund and deliver. To successfully restore ecosystems you need to ‘think big’ and restore degraded land at very large scales. Now, there is a powerful and growing movement towards landscape scale restoration that rebuilds ecological health and integrity providing benefits for both people and the environment.
Landscape-scale reforestation goes beyond a patchwork approach and knits together disconnected landscape elements, involving a collective of ecological habitats, communities, and land uses. It ensures habitat and communities are enhanced by the restoration, supporting a self-sustainable system. Landscape scale reforestation is cost effective, highly impactful and takes a long term-perspective – generations, decades and centuries.
Restore the Earth restores forest and wetland ecosystems on a landscape-scale so that our work has the greatest impact possible for business, the environment and communities.
We are restoring 1 million acres of degraded land in the Mississippi River Basin, North America’s Amazon.
FOREST RESTORATION
Forests provide the full suite of goods and services that are vital to human health, livelihood, culture and identity. They are our pantry, factory and storehouse as well as providing for wildlife habitat and diversity, water quantity and quality, carbon sequestration for clean air and scenic landscapes.
Value created by restoring our forests’ critical natural assets can now be accounted for on businesses’ and society’s balance sheet.
WETLAND RESTORATION
Wetlands act like sponges; they trap flood waters, provide storm protection, recharge ground water and remove pollution. Plants found in wetlands help control water erosion, sequester carbon and provide fish and wildlife habitat.
Wetlands are economic drivers of fishing, hunting, agriculture and recreation.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
The reforestation of 1 million-acres in North America’s Amazon is the “tipping point” that triggers positive feedback loops, allowing us to generate exponential environmental, social and economic impacts.
Restoration of healthy ecosystems reduces risk, makes communities more resilient, enhances health and well-being, creates jobs, improves livelihoods, provides a sense of place and reaffirms cultural heritage. It’s an opportunity to transform degraded land into assets that create incredible value and be boldly proactive in the fight against climate change.
Landscape scale reforestation is a significant, low-cost way to keep the world within the 2°C warming threshold. And it has the potential to cut global warming by 0.5°C by the end of the century.
Landscape scale restoration is underway – it’s not pie-in-the-sky. And it’s on the global agenda.