Countries are navigating an increasingly complex web of global commitments — National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), National Action Plans (NAPs), Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets — each with their own planning cycles, reporting requirements, and institutional homes. Yet on the ground, these commitments often converge on the same landscapes. 

Too often, national strategies mirror the fragmentation of global processes, leaving landscapes — and the communities that depend on them —caught between competing mandates rather than supported by coherent, joined-up action.  

This side event addresses that gap directly. It brings together national representatives, landscape practitioners, researchers, and policy experts to examine how landscape approaches can serve as the practical delivery vehicle for national coherence — translating overlapping global targets into unified territorial action. 

Landscape restoration is directly relevant to the implementation of multiple GBF targets. This side event specifically examines how holistic and integrated landscape restoration accelerates delivery across the following:  

Beyond the GBF, the session will highlight how landscape restoration simultaneously advances NDC land-based climate commitments, LDN targets, and the goals of the Rio Synergies roadmap — making landscape restoration one of the most cost-effective cross-convention investment opportunities available to governments. 
 
EVENT OBJECTIVES 
- Establish landscape restoration as a recognised delivery framework for the Kunming-Montreal GBF and the Rio Synergies roadmap. 
Generate concrete, transferable lessons on how governments, practitioners, and partnerships can use landscape restoration to stitch national commitments into effective, joined-up delivery. 
- Surface the persistent barriers — institutional fragmentation, misaligned planning cycles, finance gaps — that prevent landscape restoration from bridging national commitments in practice. 
- Demonstrate, through firsthand national experience, where integrated landscape planning is gaining traction and what institutional and political conditions have enabled it. 
 
KEY OUTCOMES 
During the session 
- A curated set of firsthand lessons on the institutional, financial, and political conditions that enable landscape restoration approaches to bridge national commitments 
- Shared recognition among participants that landscape restoration are practical delivery frameworks for GBF Target 2 and Rio Convention synergies, not aspirational concepts 
- A draft summary of convergent lessons and divergent contexts, validated by panelists and participants in real time  
 
Outputs and contributions

- A summary note capturing key lessons and recommendations for distribution to CBD national focal points and Rio Synergies roadmap teams 
- Strengthened political case for elevating Landscape Restoration as a named delivery mechanism alongside NbS and EbA in post-2030 frameworks 
- Practical input to the CBD COP process on how landscape restoration governance can reduce reporting burden and increase implementation coherence across the Rio Conventions