Prepare Forest Landscape Restoration Plan (including a financial plan)

ROADMAP PROGRESS

The 2025 GARI reports that the Forest Landscape Restoration Plan remains in the development phase and is expected to be completed in the coming period through implementation of the ADAPT 2.0 project. A financial plan is being developed in parallel with the technical framework: ADAPT 2.0 has identified the establishment of a regional fund for Nature-based Solutions financing as one of its key objectives, and this mechanism is expected to provide a sustainable financing vehicle for implementation of the Plan once adopted. Mobilisation of resources from the donor community and the private sector will be essential to translating the Plan’s strategic restoration targets into outcomes on the ground.

Pilot work that will feed directly into the regional Plan is already under way. The IUCN initiative on forest restoration in North Macedonia and Albania applies Nature-based Solutions, including forest landscape restoration interventions, across approximately 40 hectares of degraded forest land at Bukovikj in North Macedonia and Pashtrik-Morina in Albania. Biodiversity baseline assessments began at both pilot sites in 2025, covering forest flora, bird fauna and other biodiversity indicators. The interventions are expected to enhance biodiversity and ecological connectivity, particularly within and around adjacent protected areas, to increase carbon sequestration and ecosystem resilience and to improve habitat conditions for the Balkan lynx and other threatened endemic species, while strengthening domestic capacity, stakeholder engagement and bilateral knowledge exchange on forest landscape restoration and sustainable forest governance.

Note: Action 53b of the first Green Agenda Action Plan (2021–2030), concerning the preparation of a financial component supporting the implementation of the Forest Landscape Restoration Plan, is also integrated into Action 39 of the Revised Action Plan (2025–2030)