Landscape Restoration: The Missing Link Between Biodiversity, Climate and Land Commitments

Event Type
Panel exchange

Location / Date
Yerevan, Armenia, 27.10.2026

Organizer

CGIAR

Countries are navigating an increasingly complex web of global commitments — National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), National Action Plans (NAPs), Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets — each with their own planning cycles, reporting requirements, and institutional homes. Yet on the ground, these commitments often converge on the same landscapes.

Too often, national strategies mirror the fragmentation of global processes, leaving landscapes — and the communities that depend on them —caught between competing mandates rather than supported by coherent, joined-up action.

This side event addressed that gap directly. It brought together national representatives, landscape practitioners, researchers, and policy experts to examine how landscape approaches can serve as the practical delivery vehicle for national coherence — translating overlapping global targets into unified territorial action.

Landscape restoration is directly relevant to the implementation of multiple GBF targets. This side event specifically examined how holistic and integrated landscape restoration accelerates delivery across the following:

Beyond the GBF, the session highlighted how landscape restoration simultaneously advances NDC land-based climate commitments, LDN targets, and the goals of the Rio Synergies roadmap — making landscape restoration one of the most cost-effective cross-convention investment opportunities available to governments.

Objectives

The session had four interconnected aims:

  • Establish landscape restoration as a recognised delivery framework for the Kunming-Montreal GBF and the Rio Synergies roadmap.
  • Generate concrete, transferable lessons on how governments, practitioners, and partnerships can use landscape restoration to stitch national commitments into effective, joined-up delivery.
  • Surface the persistent barriers — institutional fragmentation, misaligned planning cycles, finance gaps — that prevent landscape restoration from bridging national commitments in practice.
  • Demonstrate, through firsthand national experience, where integrated landscape planning is gaining traction and what institutional and political conditions have enabled it.

The session was designed to maximise exchange — with structured panel contributions serving as the launch pad for open, facilitated dialogue among all participants. Rather than back-to-back presentations, it featured a dynamic, conversation-based format.

Agenda

Welcome

  • Cargele Masso, Principal Scientist, ILRI (moderator)

Scene-setting: Why are landscapes the missing link in national implementation?

  • Victoria Gutierrez, Head of Global Policy, Commonland

Panel exchange

  • Cargele Masso (moderator)
  • Anita Diederichsen, Forest Landscape Restoration Global Lead, WWF and Chair of the GPFLR
  • Willem Ferwerda, Founder Commonland
  • Lulseged Tamene Desta, Director, Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program, CGIAR
  • Niklas Wagner, Researcher, German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)
  • Terance Terence Hay-Edie, Advisory Manager, UNDP
  • Roseline Remans, NFP’s Biodiversity and Food Systems Partnership

Open dialogue with participants

Synthesis and closing

 

 

Hinweis

Während unserer Veranstaltungen werden z.T. Foto- und/oder Filmaufnahmen gemacht, die für Zwecke der Veranstaltungsberichterstattung und allgemeinen Öffentlichkeitsarbeit in verschiedenen Medien veröffentlicht werden. Sie haben jederzeit das Recht, die Foto- oder Videograf*innen darauf hinzuweisen, dass Sie nicht aufgenommen werden möchten. / During our events photos and/or videos may be taken which may be published in various media for the purposes of documentation and PR activities. You have the right at any time to point out to the photographer or videographer that you do not want to be photographed or filmed.