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CIFOR–ICRAF publishes over 750 publications every year on agroforestry, forests and climate change, landscape restoration, rights, forest policy and much more – in multiple languages.

CIFOR–ICRAF addresses local challenges and opportunities while providing solutions to global problems for forests, landscapes, people and the planet.

We deliver actionable evidence and solutions to transform how land is used and how food is produced: conserving and restoring ecosystems, responding to the global climate, malnutrition, biodiversity and desertification crises. In short, improving people’s lives.

The ‘Missing Middle’: Landscape Restoration’s Greatest Challenge

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The world urgently needs to restore huge swaths of land to meet the demand for ecosystem services and is targeting 350 M Ha by 2030 under the New York Declaration on Forests and the Bonn Challenge. Tremendous resources - financial, human and other - are needed at international, national, sub-national and local levels. International mobilization has been great so far. National awareness and commitments are also robust. Many excellent local success stories have also been reported. However, for scaling up and implementing restoration, a critical mass of involvement of sub-national governments, local NGOs, CBOs, academia, and enterprise is needed. So far, evidence of engagement of this key cohort is thin, and this missing meso level engagement may well be restoration’s number one challenge. This is what this policy brief seeks to address.
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