Regional Bonn Challenge Conference in Honduras

This year, the regional conference will be focusing on forest governance and how to generate employment in and around forest and landscape restoration.

The third edition of the Regional Bonn Challenge Conference in Latin America will be taking place in Honduras from 12 to 13 June. Ministers and high-level representatives from Central and South America as well as international organisations will meet at the two-day event with the aim of strengthening their cooperation on forest and landscape restoration.

Established in 2011, the Bonn Challenge is the most important global initiative on forest and landscape restoration. Participating countries have set themselves the target of restoring 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded land by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. The forest and landscape restoration commitments made by members of the Bonn Challenge are creating new jobs. The German Environment Ministry (BMUB) is supporting its partner countries in implementing their plans through its International Climate Initiative (IKI).

The Bonn Challenge has so far garnered 44 commitments from national and subnational governments and non-governmental organisations to restore more than 150.03 million hectares of degraded land. In Latin America, the 18 commitments announced cover a total of 35.64 million hectares. Countries involved in Latin America are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.

This year’s Regional Bonn Challenge Conference in Honduras has three goals: to foster policy and technical support for landscape restoration activities, to share experiences with countries in Latin America on good governance in the forestry sector and employment generation processes in landscape restoration, as well as to strengthen cooperation between countries in the region.

The Bonn Challenge was launched by the German government and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with support of the Norwegian government. The Regional Bonn Challenge Conference in Latin America is organised by the IKI project “Compensation payments for resource and landscape management conducive to carbon storage” (REDD+ Landscape/CCAD), which is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.