Restor: Connecting grassroots heroes for nature restoration on a global scale

Nature restoration projects play a crucial role in tackling the environmental challenges our planet is facing

By reversing the degradation of natural ecosystems and boosting their resilience to climate change, these projects can not only create and support biodiverse wildlife habitats but also improve water quality and capture more carbon.

Since becoming a Finalist of The Earthshot Prize in 2021 for their innovative online nature restoration platform, Restor now lists over 130,000 projects worldwide – including those stemming from a collaboration between that year’s winner: Costa Rica.

Stephanie Feeney from Restor explains how their platform is helping to protect and restore the world’s vital natural ecosystems.

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Hi Stephanie, for those less familiar with Restor, can you please describe what you do?

Yes, Restor (www.restor.eco) is a digital hub for nature! Our aim is to support the scaling of 1 million nature projects by 2030.

We connect conservation and restoration projects to the data, funding, and knowledge they need to scale up for people, biodiversity and climate impact. We bring the visibility and scientific transparency needed for responsible investment into nature restoration.

While it is encouraging that governments and companies are pledging billions of dollars towards ecosystem restoration targets, history is littered with examples of top-down decisions gone wrong. Learning from the mistakes of the past, we must ensure this is a bottom-up movement where millions of local communities are engaged and financially incentivised by healthy nature.

It is critical that we empower grassroots efforts by local farmers, communities, and indigenous peoples currently working in isolated and resource-constrained contexts. Restor has been built to serve these grassroots initiatives.

By showing where these efforts are happening across the world, and what they are doing, we shine a light on what would otherwise go largely unseen. Once these projects become part of the Restor community they can connect to a network of peers, experts, funders, service providers – as well as scientific data – that can accelerate their work.

If we want a fully transparent and impactful restoration movement, nature investments should be distributed across millions of projects, visible and accessible to everyone, everywhere.

You have recently partnered with 2021 Earthshot Prize Winner Costa Rica, can you tell us a little about that?

Yes, the Government of Costa Rica and Restor first connected when both were named as Protect and Restore Nature Finalists for the 2021 Earthshot Prize.

Since then we entered into a partnership that promises to provide more transparency to the country’s conservation and restoration efforts. Costa Rica’s payment program for nature restoration projects is published on Restor, making their commitments on forest loss and recovery traceable and accountable. The partnership has even opened the door for similar conversations with other countries.

Restor, alongside Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich, is also working with Costa Rica to develop scientific tools and methods to boost transparency around ecosystem management more generally. This work aims to improve the quality of climate and biodiversity data that will be made available globally to support climate action and decision-making and improve environmental integrity in nature-based carbon markets.

Finally, what makes you optimistic for the future?

The magic of nature makes me optimistic for the future!

It is an astounding thing to see how biodiversity can recover so rapidly if we just give it a chance. When we see thousands of local communities around the world on the Restor platform thriving because of the regeneration of their local biodiversity, we become increasingly confident that we can all start to follow their lead.