Local land restoration projects and their financiers need accurate data to solve problems and celebrate success. But existing monitoring systems are too complex and expensive to scale across thousands of restoration sites.

Tested and co-created in the field with more than 200 projects, this guidebook details WRI’s approach to monitoring, reporting on, and verifying local land restoration at scale. Its methodology is powered both by the knowledge of local project implementers financed through the TerraFund partnership in Africa and by rapid technological advancements in satellite analysis and artificial intelligence. Combined, this can reduce the costs of verifying the outcomes of a large portfolio of projects by as much as 98%.

By sharing a simpler, standardized method to monitor many local projects all at once, this guidebook seeks to strengthen transparency, accountability, and efficiency for this growing economic sector. WRI anticipates that this approach will empower and elevate the hard work of local communities delivering measurable ecological, climatic, and socio-economic benefits. In turn, more transparency can unlock new outcome-based finance mechanisms that are backed by strong data from the field and the sky.

Executive Summary

Land restoration has the potential to bring life back to degraded land, improving biodiversity, food security, climate resilience, and livelihoods. Without the tools to monitor, report on, and verify implementation, however, land restoration remains underfunded. The MRV approach described in this guidebook enables small and medium-size restoration organizations to demonstrate the environmental, socio-economic, and financial benefits of their projects and attract the finance necessary to scale their impact.

This approach was developed and tested in the context of TerraFund, a restoration financing partnership created by WRI, One Tree Planted, and Realize Impact. TerraFund provides grant, debt, and equity funding and capacity-strengthening support to medium- and growth-stage organizations across Africa.

This approach has been applied across thousands of individual sites, ranging in size from a single soccer field to a national forest. The framework captures quantitative and qualitative data about project progress using nine biophysical, socioeconomic, and financial indicator categories. It combines this with tested methods for collecting and analyzing geospatial location data, an integrated digital platform for reporting and public communications, and targeted assistance for implementing partners.

This framework is designed to be cost-efficient. WRI estimates that for the first 198 projects funded through TerraFund, a novel approach to counting and verifying trees—enabled by high-resolution satellite imagery and the DINOv3 artificial intelligence model—could reduce independent verification costs by 98% when compared to field inventories or photointerpretation methods.  

WRI designed this method to be replicable across countries, ecosystems, and cultural contexts. WRI has already adapted this framework for two WRI-managed restoration financing and technical assistance, Harit Bharat Fund in India and Fundo Flora in Brazil.

The guidebook opens the door to mobilizing billions of dollars for restoration through “outcome-based finance,” where financiers pay for the verified social and environmental outcomes of a project rather than the upfront costs, limiting their risk. As more organizations and funders recognize the potential of restoration to support environmental, social, and climate goals, this guidebook is one resource they can draw on and adapt to their contexts.

The Bezos Earth Fund provided catalytic funding to develop the MRV innovations described in this playbook. WRI's work on this method is generously supported by The Audacious Project, Mastercard, Good Energies Foundation, Caterpillar Foundation, DOEN Foundation, Meta, AKO Foundation, Lyda Hill Philanthropies, Sequoia Climate Foundation, and Ikea Foundation. This work is inspired by the Tree Restoration Monitoring Framework created by Conservation International and WRI for the Priceless Planet Coalition.