Protect & Restore

Striving to build a land-based restoration economy for India, the ‘Protect & Restore’ team within WRI India’s Food, Land and Water program works towards protecting open natural ecosystems and harnessing India’s restoration potential through a systems change approach to ensure that India’s landscapes are governed fairly and managed well.

India's forests and agricultural landscapes are facing multiple challenges such as degradation, fragmentation, declining productivity, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and competing land use, exacerbated by the changing climate. WRI India’s Restoration Opportunities Atlas for India shows that over 100 million hectares of India’s total land offer a potential for forest protection and landscape restoration. This presents an opportunity for people, nature and climate as it can sequester 3 to 4.3 giga tons of above-ground carbon by 2040 while improving local livelihoods and incomes, securing resource rights, enhancing food security and nutrition for people in the country, as well as improving the flow of ecosystem services.

The Protect and Restore team pillar works towards harnessing India’s restoration potential through interdisciplinary systems change lens, that seeks to address demand, supply and policy related barriers to ensure that India’s landscapes are governed fairly and managed well. We are working with national and sub-national governments, research organizations, civil society organizations, businesses, experts and stakeholders at the grassroots level to build a resilient, inclusive and locally-led restoration economy in India. Our focus is on designing science-based and locally viable restoration solutions; identifying and easing bottlenecks to their uptake; and building pathways to scale these innovative solutions in rural, peri-urban and urban contexts. Within this broader ambit, the following interconnected workstreams seek to build the social, economic, technical and financial conditions for protecting and restoring landscapes in India:

Establishing tools, methodologies, pilots and proofs of concept for landscape-level restoration planning,
Building an enabling policy ecosystem for restoration by reducing barriers and designing incentives,
Facilitating access to capacity and capital for local restoration champions, including entrepreneurs, non-governmental organizations and community groups,
Developing robust, interdisciplinary, and participatory monitoring systems,
Building and convening a diverse and inclusive community of practice to scale locally-led restoration in India.

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