Background
The Ministerial Meeting on Forest Landscape Restoration and the ECCA30/Bonn Challenge in Eastern and South-East Europe took place on 12th of October, 2021. It was the first endeavour to strengthen political commitment and enhance collaboration on forest landscape restoration within the region.
The Meeting provided an opportunity for the Eastern and South-East European countries to join, contribute and reinforce global communities’ efforts within the Bonn Challenge (a global initiative to bring 350 million hectares of degraded and deforested land into restoration by 2030) and the ECCA30 (a regional forest restoration initiative of Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia with a 30 million hectare target by 2030). The Ministerial Meeting brought together 14 countries of Eastern and South-East Europe and offered a platform to declare countries’ commitments to accelerate work on identification of deforested and degraded lands and intensify efforts to restore and afforest them by 2030.
Countries decided to take bold action in forest restoration process and committed to restore more than 4 million ha of land by 2030 under the Global Bonn Challenge.
The Ministerial Meeting was organized jointly by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in cooperation with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the support of the Government of Germany.