Sustainable Development Goal 15

Forests and terrestrial ecosystems provide vital services for people and the planet, but they are under severe threat. The tropics lost 12 million hectares of forest cover in 2018, including 3.6 million hectares of primary forest, some of the most biodiverse and carbon-rich rainforest in the world. Across the world, croplands are expanding, forests and natural grasslands are dwindling, and desertification is increasing.

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss

WRI’s Forests Program helps governments, businesses and civil society join forces to halt deforestation and restore degraded forest landscapes (SDG 15.1, SDG 15.2), helping to protect the earth’s climate and biodiversity and the 1 billion people who rely on forests for their income, food, water and medicine.

Because you can’t stop a problem you can’t see, WRI’s Global Forest Watch initiative applies cutting-edge technology to create radical transparency about the state of the world’s forests and how they are changing (SDG 15.2, SDG 15.5, SDG 15.9). Our satellite-based forest monitoring system empowers people everywhere to respond to forest threats and opportunities in near-real time.

The Global Restoration Initiative works with governments and international partners to inspire, enable and implement restoration of degraded landscapes, recovering economic productivity and ecological values (SDG 15.2, SDG 15.3). WRI serves as the secretariat for Initiative 20X20, a country-led regional partnership in Latin America that aims to bring more than 20 million hectares of land into the process of restoration by 2020, and is a founding partner of AFR100, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, which aims to bring 100 million hectares of land in Africa into restoration by 2030.

WRI also leads the Forest Legality Initiative, which works to reduce illegal logging by supporting the supply and procurement of legal and sustainable forest products (SDG 15.7). An international, multi-stakeholder initiative, it is designed improve forest governance and biodiversity conservation by reducing demand for illegally harvested forest products and increasing the capacity of supply chains to deliver legal wood and paper.