The Sahel Integrated Resilience Initiative has been officially recognized by the United Nations as one of three new World Restoration Flagships, honoring its extensive efforts to revive degraded landscapes across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Launched to combat the intertwined pressures of climate change, drought, and desertification, the program has strengthened food security and livelihoods for more than four million people since 2018 by rehabilitating over 335,000 hectares of land.
Sahel Resilience Initiative Recognized as UN World Restoration Flagship
The formal recognition was announced during a high-level event at the seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The awards are part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which is led by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to highlight some of the world’s most ambitious ecosystem recovery efforts.
The impacts of climate change, drought and desertification, as well as ongoing geopolitical tensions, are hitting global food systems hard,
said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP. Andersen added that investing in healthy land serves as a primary defense against these vulnerabilities, demonstrating how ecosystem restoration yields wide-ranging benefits including new jobs and enhanced resilience.
On-the-Ground Techniques and Regional Implementation
The initiative deploys a variety of localized restoration techniques tailored to dryland ecosystems. These methods include water-harvesting infrastructure, agroforestry, wetland restoration, zai pits, stone bunds, and the planting of native species designed to improve soil fertility, water retention, and overall vegetation cover.
Practical application of these strategies varies across the participating nations. In Chad alone, interventions reached more than one million people across 313 villages in 2025. Activities there included dune stabilization, soil restoration using stone bunds, and the construction of floodwater-harvesting dikes. Beyond environmental repairs, the program incorporates school feeding, nutrition interventions, and livelihood opportunities to address the immediate needs of populations impacted by drought, conflict, and climate shocks, including cross-border refugees escaping the conflict in Sudan.
The resilience program is implemented collaboratively through national governments, local communities, UN agencies, and contributions from external donors, most notably Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Urgent Food Insecurity and 2030 Targets
The international recognition arrives amid deepening regional agricultural challenges. Recent data highlights a continued deterioration in food security across the Sahel, with an estimated 7.4 million people projected to face crisis-level food insecurity—categorized as Phase 3+ or worse—during the June-August 2026 lean season.
Land degradation is not irreversible,
said Kinday Samba, Regional Director for Western and Central Africa at the World Food Programme (WFP), emphasizing that land restoration forms the essential foundation for long-term food security and community resilience.
Looking ahead toward the end of the decade, the Sahel Integrated Resilience Initiative maintains ambitious goals:
- Restoring a total of 470,000 hectares of degraded land by 2030.
- Boosting regional biodiversity.
- Locking away up to 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, an amount equivalent to avoiding the consumption of nearly 47 million barrels of oil.
Globally, the initiative stands alongside newly recognized flagships from Brazil and Saudi Arabia. Together, these three regional efforts have committed to restoring nearly five million hectares by 2030 as part of the broader UN-backed push to reverse global environmental degradation.
