IUCN and Airbus Join Hands for Largest Land Restorative Initiative

Ahead of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, campaign ambassador Bianca Jagger, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Airbus have launched an online campaign called Plant a Pledge. The main aim of the campaign is to mobilise public support for the largest restoration initiative in history of 150 million hectares.

The 150 million hectare target is known as the Bonn Challenge, after ministers and CEOs met last year in Germany to issue an urgent rallying cry to the global community.

"IUCN's latest research now shows that in restoring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land by 2020 which is only 15 percent of the estimated area of degraded forests worldwide - we would see more than US$ 84 billion net injected annually into local and global economies and cut the climate change "emissions reduction gap" by 11-17 percent." stated Stewart Maginnis, Director of the Nature-Based Solutions Group of IUCN. "It will make significant contributions to the global challenges we face today, alleviating poverty, slowing global warming and securing food, particularly for those who need it most."

The campaign is calling on individuals around the world to Plant a Pledge of support through the campaign website which will become a global petition to be delivered at the UN climate change talks in Qatar, later this year.

Each online pledge asks governments, private landowners and communities who manage lands to commit areas for restoration in order to achieve the Bonn Challenge by 2020.

The Global Partnership for Forest Landscape Restoration (GPFLR), who along with the German government hosted the original Bonn Challenge meeting, recently identified two billion hectares of land worldwide (an area the size of South America) as offering opportunities for forest landscape restoration. Repairing landscapes would restore their ability to support people and wildlife and would significantly increase global capacity to process greenhouse gases, according to IUCN.

"Improving fuel efficiency is at the heart of our business and we have reduced emissions by 70 percent in the last 40 years. Aviation today represents 2 percent of manmade emissions and we are continuing to improve the efficiency of our industry to reduce this, having invested over two billion Euros in environmental research and development, this year alone. The partnership with the IUCN reflects our commitment to support those tackling the other 98 percent," stated Andrea Debbané, Airbus Vice President of Environment Affairs.