THE CHALLENGE

Repairing Planet, People and Peace

People flee from droughts, hunger and war. They generate enormous forces to find better living conditions. A refugee camp is always seen as a stopover – but the onward journey is risky, costly and hard. A high percentage of people will never leave the camp again.
 
Globally, there are about 79.5 million forcibly displaced people including refugees. At the same time, more than 75% of Earth’s Land Areas are substantially degraded. This undermines the well-being of almost half of the world’s population. The annual costs of land degradation are more than US$ 231 billion.
 

Refugees & Restoration for Future

Ecosystem restoration on land means improving the soil fertility, the water cycle, the local climate with regenerative practices like permaculture, agroecology, agroforestry, holistic management, organic farming and other techniques. You literally plant the seeds for a healthy future of people, because you strengthen the ecosystem services like food production, clean water and air, cooling and shade, natural building material and many more.
 
We are now in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030).
Ecosystem Restoration is needed for fertile soil, peace building and to gain resilience to climate change (see this article).
We can use this momentum to bring the nature based and people centered solutions into the spotlight and let them multiply and pollinate others as well as scale the positive impact.
 
With restoration, we can tackle big crises like biodiversity loss, climate change, hunger and water scarcity in an effective way. The restoration of degraded ecosystems by 2030 can generate 9 trillion US-Dollars in ecosystem services and remove 13 to 26 gigatons of CO2e from the atmosphere. The benefits exceed the costs of the initial investment tenfold.
 
Let us strengthen the root system of a resilient society.

  We are the Generation Restoration  

THE STRATEGY

The needs detected in our stakeholder dialogues were scaling, funding, guidance and networking.

VISION:      
Our vision is to empower refugee camps worldwide to transform from stagnant places of dependency into thriving places of hope. Through regenerative methods such as permaculture, forest gardening (agroforestry), the restoration of ecosystems and social business. We want to inspire and contribute to this.

WHY:          
Need for healing people and planet, ecosystem services, food, peace

HOW:        
Speed & scale for regenerative solutions in refugee camps

WHAT:        
We bring together organisations, projects, funding and networks – as a bridgebuilder

Our goals for 2024 & 2025:

We want to measure and visualise the sustainable impact of regenerative projects in refugee settlements (impact assessment). To this end, we want to strengthen existing grassroots projects and support their successful further development. The lessons learned will be incorporated into systemic change: in parallel, we are working in multi-stakeholder dialogues with UN organisations and NGOs on how regenerative design can be incorporated into camps, strategically, through guidelines and cooperation. We want to strengthen the root system of resilient societies. 

 

 

General Observations

  1. Restoration with refugees has a great potential.
  2. Good examples with knowledge & experience already exist.
  3. Obstacles hinder them to be widespread yet.
  4. Learning from each other can help overcome the constraints.
  5. It needs grass root support, new standards and viable approaches for impact investment.

 

Strategy & Theory of Change

1. SCALE Positive Examples: Funding for grass root projects to multiply

Successful grass root projects with proof of concept now need fast AND long-term oriented funding to multiply their impacts, for example to create permaculture train-the-trainer-programs, build educational centers and train millions of refugees.

2. CHANGE Standards: Facilitating dialogues with standard setters (guidelines)

Big institutional stakeholders and NGOs are not yet focusing on long-term regenerative solutions on a large scale. In a facilitated participatory process, they co-develop common visions and strategies, including learnings and wisdom from existing projects.

3. DEVELOP Opportunities: Cultivate business models for impact investment

Impact Investors are just about to discover the potential of combining ecosystem restoration with humanitarian or development aid, resulting in multiple benefits. They need guidance on how to measure positive impact of projects and how to help them become “investable”.

“We want to strengthen the root system of a resilient society. We are the Generation Restoration.”

Regenerative practices in refugee camps and settlements can contribute
to the achievement of all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). See here how.

Contribution to all 17 SDGs