The Landscape Monitoring Accelerator
Supporting the use of cutting-edge technology to track restoration and land use planning efforts
Over 3 billion people around the world can no longer rely on their land to feed and support them due to ongoing degradation, including deforestation, illegal or irresponsible mining, unsustainable agricultural practices and erosion. This situation is only growing worse: in 2021, the world lost 11.1 million hectares of tree cover in the tropics.
Governments and land restoration practitioners around the world are taking action by growing trees, stabilizing eroded areas, restoring wetlands and much more. Through the ambitious Bonn Challenge and UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, countries around the world have pledged to restore over 200 million hectares of land. But which restoration and land use policies work best? Where can successes be found? Which policies should be scaled-up, and which policies should be shifted to better meet these ambitious targets?
The Landscape Monitoring Accelerator is a peer-to-peer capacity development program for policy-makers and government officials looking to improve or design monitoring systems to track the performance and impacts of restoration and land use policies. Through workshops and individualized mentoring with world-class experts, participants identify challenges and co-create solutions to shift and measure the effectiveness of their restoration programs. By collaborating with mentors and other cohort members, participants will design systems to help them better understand whether their policies are supporting smallholder farmers, protecting endangered species, sequestering carbon and more.
The Monitoring Accelerator supports policies focused on the implementation of country NDCs for the land use, land-use change, forestry (LULUCF) and agriculture sectors. It brings together leading practitioners, data scientists, economists and experts in their fields to share their expertise on monitoring, data management and policy/incentive programs, including carbon taxes, compensations and payments for ecosystem services, to support policy innovators’ needs. The program supports policy-makers by providing access to analyses, mentors and networks that enhance policy innovators’ abilities to advocate for cost-effective policies that support restoration on forests and agricultural lands, as well as land use planning in their respective countries.
The goal of the Monitoring Accelerator is to help policy innovators better understand how to improve monitoring systems linked to policy performance and impacts. Together with other Accelerator participants, policy-makers exchange knowledge and experiences related to the development and implementation of monitoring systems.
Accelerator sessions are designed to:
- Innovate solutions to key bottlenecks in the design and implementation of monitoring systems for landscape restoration in support of the NDCs in the LULUCF and Agriculture sectors
- Facilitate the exchange of experiences on monitoring frameworks and data to inform decision-making around policy performance and impacts
- Create a network of leading policy innovators in landscape restoration with knowledge on tools and methods for monitoring and transparency
- Strengthen national capacities to implement monitoring systems for restoration and land use policies that promote sustainable production, enrich biodiversity, reduce carbon emissions and support the lives of landowners and smallholder farmers
The first cohort of the Restoration Monitoring Accelerator features national government representatives from eight Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. The program will expand into Africa and other regions in the future.
Cover Image by: René Zamora Cristales/WRI