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The Decade of Restoration Starts With a Promise Not to Repeat Old Harms

Written by Amaterra
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In 2021, the United Nations launched a decade of ecosystem restoration. Its success depends on a simple principle: restoration must be ecologically sound, locally governed and fair.

World Environment Day 2021 marked the launch of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, led by UNEP and FAO. The initiative set out a global call to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation during the decade to 2030. Its timing was significant. Climate disruption, biodiversity loss and pollution were increasingly recognized as interconnected crises, while the pandemic had highlighted the cost of treating environmental health as separate from human well-being. Restoration offered a hopeful public language: damaged ecosystems can recover, and people can take part in that recovery.

Hope, however, is not a substitute for care. Restoration can be misunderstood as a simple planting exercise or as a way to compensate for continuing destruction elsewhere. Neither approach is enough. An ecosystem is more than the visible plants placed in it. It includes soils, water, fungi, insects, wildlife, ecological processes and the people whose practices have shaped the landscape over time. A restoration project that ignores those relationships may produce an impressive photograph while failing to improve biodiversity, resilience or local well-being.

The first question should therefore be: restore what, and to what purpose? In some places, the priority is to protect an intact ecosystem before it is degraded. In others, it is to remove a pressure, reconnect a river, restore native vegetation, reduce erosion or support the return of a species. In agricultural landscapes, it may mean rebuilding soil health, diversifying crops, improving water retention and strengthening farmers’ capacity to adapt. In drylands, it may mean protecting mobility, managing grazing collectively and restoring water sources. The methods differ because the social and ecological conditions differ.

The second question is: who governs the work? Many places targeted for restoration are inhabited, used or culturally significant to Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Projects can create risk when they are planned without free, prior and informed consent, when land rights are insecure, or when new carbon and biodiversity incentives encourage outside actors to claim control. A rights-based approach does not delay restoration. It makes it more likely to last. Communities need decision-making power, fair benefits, access to grievance mechanisms and the ability to shape monitoring. Local knowledge should be welcomed through genuine collaboration, not collected as a decorative contribution after key choices have been made.

The third question is: how will we know whether recovery is real? Counting seedlings is easy. Measuring functioning ecosystems and equitable governance is harder, but far more valuable. Monitoring should include ecological indicators chosen for the place, such as water flow, soil cover, habitat connectivity or species return. It should also include community-defined indicators: access to resources, time burdens, local employment, cultural values, safety and confidence in decision-making. GIS and remote sensing can help track change, but they should be used alongside field observation and under clear rules about data ownership, access and privacy.

The UN Decade was a powerful invitation because it connected restoration to livelihoods, climate and biodiversity. Amaterra can carry that invitation forward with a practical standard. Support restoration that protects existing ecosystems, respects land and resource rights, uses locally appropriate species and methods, funds long-term maintenance, and reports honestly on outcomes. Celebrate small projects, but do not ask them to compensate for policies that continue to degrade land and water. The restoration we need is not a campaign of quick fixes. It is a long commitment to repair relationships: between people and place, between evidence and decision-making, and between the benefits of nature and the responsibilities of care.

The launch year asked the world to become a generation of restoration. That phrase can mean more than a campaign slogan. It can mean learning to recognize when a landscape needs protection rather than intervention, when a community needs direct support rather than outside control, and when a project must change course. It can mean treating ecological recovery as a shared civic responsibility. Restoration succeeds when it increases the capacity of both ecosystems and communities to withstand change without sacrificing dignity, rights or future options.

The financing question cannot be avoided. Restoration takes patient investment, while many projects are funded for only a year or two. Communities may be expected to maintain sites without resources after external partners leave. A credible restoration commitment pays for the less visible foundations: local coordinators, training, follow-up visits, native seed supply, maintenance, monitoring and adaptive management. It supports the people doing the work, not only the materials installed or the hectares announced. And it remains accountable when outcomes fall short of expectations.

Biodiversity

Conservation Cannot Be Built by Exclusion

Written by Amaterra
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A rights-based approach is not a concession to nature protection. It is one of the conditions for doing it well.

For too long, “fortress conservation” has imagined that nature is protected when people are kept out: fences, guards, evictions and rules made far from the places they govern. The human cost has fallen most heavily on Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists and rural families whose knowledge and care have shaped many of the landscapes now described as wilderness.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment has been direct: exclusionary conservation can violate rights and can fail nature itself. Conservation that displaces or criminalizes people damages trust, ignores local observation and often removes the very stewards whose practices sustained biodiversity.

There is a different path. Begin with land and resource rights, free, prior and informed consent, fair participation in governance and an honest process for remedy when harm has occurred. Fund community institutions, not only outside enforcement. Make room for customary harvest, grazing and seasonal movement where these practices sustain ecosystems. And measure success through both biodiversity outcomes and the security, dignity and decision-making power of the people who live with the work. Protecting nature and protecting rights are not competing goals; they are mutually reinforcing responsibilities.

This approach also asks conservation organizations to be accountable for their own conduct. Are safeguards accessible to people in the places where projects operate? Can someone report harm without risking retaliation? Does funding reach community institutions directly? Are rangers and partner agencies trained in human rights? Is there an independent way to investigate serious complaints? These questions should be normal parts of conservation planning. Nature does not need a model built on dispossession. It needs relationships of care that can survive political change, economic pressure and the long work of restoration.

Rights-based conservation is sometimes dismissed as slow or complicated. It can indeed require patience: listening before designing a project, resolving tenure questions, sharing authority, working through conflict and returning to decisions when circumstances change. Yet exclusion is not simple either. It often creates enforcement costs, resentment, hidden land-use pressure and a cycle of disputes that consumes years. A project that begins with respect for rights may be more demanding at the outset, but it has a better chance of becoming legitimate, durable and locally defended.

The language we use matters here. Calling an inhabited landscape “empty” erases the relationships that have kept it alive: controlled burning, seasonal harvest, grazing rotation, seed saving, fishing practices, sacred responsibilities and informal rules of care. None of these practices is automatically benign, and communities themselves are not uniform. But treating local people as a threat by default guarantees that conservation begins with a false story. It also makes collaboration harder when ecological conditions change and adaptive knowledge is most needed.

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