In a village on the Indonesian island of Java, eight men are wielding saws and machetes with practiced precision, preparing long bamboo poles that they will use to defend their embattled community.
The men are fighting back against the erosion and rising sea levels that have swallowed up vast areas of land along Java’s north coast, including in their home district of Demak. Key to their strategy is restoring a protective belt of mangroves.
“To do this, we create traps for sediment from local bamboo and nets,” explained Ahmad Busro, a community leader, as the poles piled up behind him. “The hope is that when enough sediment accumulates, seeds that naturally drop off the mangrove can settle and grow.”
This innovative approach to mangrove restoration is part of a multipronged effort pioneered by Wetlands International to harness the power of nature to benefit both people and nature.
In December, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration selected the “Building With Nature” programme in Demak among its first 10 UN World Restoration Flagships to inspire the growing global movement to revive the natural world.
Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), described the programme as “a stellar example of smart and forward-looking adaptation work in action.
“It’s a model worth replicating for how countries can use nature to ward off the severe impacts of climate change while simultaneously creating new economic opportunities for people,” Andersen said as the flagships were announced.There is growing momentum behind the UN Decade’s mission to conserve and regenerate ecosystems on land and sea to address the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Humans have significantly altered three-quarters of the Earth’s dry land and impacted two-thirds of its oceans.
In December 2022, nations agreed a new Global Biodiversity Framework that includes ambitious restoration targets. Under the framework, countries promised to restore at least 30 percent of degraded land and water areas.