Tracking Progress: Monitoring Forest and Landscape Restoration

There is no debate: People need to restore the world's degraded land by growing trees and transforming farms, forests, and pasture into more productive ecosystems. That's how we can grow more food, safeguard biodiversity, and store carbon. But to know where we're going, we need to know where we have been. We need to track progress toward our restoration goals, but it's not quite as simple as it may sound.

This guide showcases the latest advances in monitoring restoration from World Resources Institute's Global Restoration Initiative. You will find examples of our work on individual tree-growing projects, across landscapes and countries, and globally.

If you are someone actively restoring land, we hope that this inspires you to invest in showing the impact of your work. If you are funding restoration, we hope that you will gain a new appreciation for this challenge and recognize why measuring progress is key to success. And if you are a researcher working in this field, we hope you can join us in tackling some of our remaining questions.

To sum it up, think of this as our effort to track our own progress toward answering a tough, yet important question: How much land are people restoring?

Check out additional resources below. Questions? Feedback? Reach out to restoration.monitoring@wri.org