UN Report Counts a Record 252 Million Hectares of Nature Under Restoration in 149 Countries

Across 149 countries, 252 million hectares of land, freshwater and coastal habitat are now being actively restored, according to a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Convention on Biological Diversity secretariat. The *Restoration Progress Report: Nature's Comeback*, published on 29 October 2026, describes it as the largest documented restoration effort to date.

What the report found

• 252 million hectares under restoration worldwide, drawn from government-endorsed data and from initiatives reporting through FAO's monitoring framework.
• More than one million green jobs supported by the work.
• Asia leads in area with about 192 million hectares, followed by Africa at about 36 million and Europe at about 9 million.

Why it matters

Restoring degraded ecosystems can bring back wildlife, protect soil and water, store carbon and create local work. Having a first worldwide count gives governments and communities a baseline to measure progress against, rather than a collection of separate national figures.

The honest context

The report is clear that the job is far from done:

• The 252 million hectares equals roughly a third of the indicative benchmark tied to the global goal of restoring one billion hectares.
• Freshwater (about 11 million hectares) and marine and coastal ecosystems (about 5.7 million hectares) lag well behind land, although limited reporting on aquatic work may mean these are undercounts.
• Annual restoration finance would need to rise from about US$64 billion today to about US$296 billion by 2030, according to the report's estimates.

What's next

The report's message is that momentum exists but must speed up. Better reporting on water-based restoration and a large increase in investment are the two gaps it highlights, and the data it now provides should make progress easier to track year by year.