Restoring nature: what the global stocktake measures
· BehindLines newsroom
A UN report published on 29 October estimates that 252 million hectares are under restoration in 149 countries. Reuters presents it as the largest global restoration effort to date and specifies that the ecosystems covered are land, sea and freshwater. This total describes areas where restoration has begun; it does not mean that their recovery is complete.
Reuters details the split by region: 192.2 million hectares in Asia, 36.3 million in Africa, 9.1 million in Europe, 5.8 million in North and Central America, 5.4 million in South America and 3.2 million in Oceania. These figures add up to the announced total.
The United Nations goal is to restore one billion hectares by 2030. According to Reuters, the report concludes that efforts are having an effect but need to be scaled up rapidly. The agency also cites a funding need: annual finance should rise from 64 billion to 296 billion dollars by 2030, more than a fourfold increase.
A summary published by LNB News describes an imbalance between environments. Land restoration is further ahead, while restoration of freshwater, seas and coastlines lags behind. The same summary says that China reports the largest terrestrial area under restoration.
How is such a stocktake built? A text from the FAO dated 19 October, as COP17 opened in Yerevan, describes the work behind the figures. The organisation explains that information on restoration is often scattered across conventions, institutions and projects. In 2026, the FAO and its partners revised the metadata of the indicator on area under restoration, with more explicit guidance for national data and reporting systems.
Its monitoring platform lets countries review the figures, check their national data and validate their contributions to Target 2 of the online reporting tool of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The task is therefore as much about the quality of information as about its volume.
The stocktake should be read as a progress report, not as a final result: an area under restoration is not an area restored, and the 2030 deadline still lies ahead.