Fighting fire with forests across the Mediterranean

As a boy, Wael Mostafa watched a volunteer fire crew battling a blaze for three straight days near his Lebanese village.  

“I thought: ‘This is what I want to become when I am older,’” Mostafa recalls. “I used to see a lot of forest fires burning and it was heartbreaking for me.” 

Today, Mostafa is a programme manager—and a volunteer firefighter—for the Association for Forests, Development and Conservation in Lebanon. The non-profit group is devoted to protecting and restoring forest landscapes, including its famed cedar trees. 

The association’s work falls under the banner of the Restoring Mediterranean Forests initiative, an ambitious effort to revive woodlands that span from Morocco to Lebanon. The initiative has restored 2 million hectares of forest, creating economic opportunities and helping to counter devastating wildfires in the process.  

The United Nations recently named the effort a 2024 World Restoration Flagship, an award that recognizes outstanding efforts to rekindle nature. The honour, which makes the initiative eligible for funding and technical support from the UN, is part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a global movement to prevent and reverse the degradation of the natural world. 

“The Mediterranean region is rapidly turning into a tinderbox and firefighting alone will not be enough to protect it in the long run,” says Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). “This far-reaching initiative to restore forests from fires presents an incredible opportunity to restore ecosystems that are home to as many as 25,000 species who inhabit the Mediterranean basin, including almost half-a-billion people.” 

The Restoring Mediterranean Forests initiative is coordinated by the Committee on Mediterranean Forestry Questions - Silva Mediterranea, a statutory body of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 

Climate change hotspot 

Scientists point to the Mediterranean Basin as a hotspot of environmental degradation and climate change. Scorching temperatures and years-long droughts are impoverishing farmers, drying up water sources, and fanning the risk of wildfire, with potentially catastrophic consequences for local ecosystems and communities. 

In just a sample of incidents from 2023, Greece suffered the largest wildfire ever recorded in the European Union; fast-moving flames killed dozens of people in Algeria; and a month-long blaze drove tens of thousands from their homes on the Spanish island of Tenerife. 

To counter the pressures degrading their land and sea, more countries are looking to ecosystem restoration, harnessing the power of nature and the livelihoods that it supports to keep landscapes and communities safe and resilient. 

Governments across the globe have pledged to restore a total of 1 billion hectares—an area larger than China—in their commitments to meet global climate, biodiversity and land degradation goals. 

Restoration to the rescue 

The Restoring Mediterranean Forests initiative groups restoration programmes across the region with a focus on Morocco, Tunisia and Türkiye as well as Lebanon. The initiative has already restored an area of around 2 million hectares across the whole region since 2017, more than 500 times the size of Athens, Greece. A total of 8 million hectares have been earmarked for restoration by 2030, including areas affected by wildfire.

Lebanon, for example, has developed a programme to increase national forest cover to 20 per cent from 13 per cent. Morocco has committed to restoring 4.5 million hectares of land, Tunisia 2 million hectares and Türkiye 2.3 million hectares. 

As they work toward their national targets, governments and their partners are exchanging insights to make their interventions more effective in reviving the ecosystems of the Mediterranean, which is a global biodiversity hotspot.  

“A lot of the countries of the region are highly experienced with wildfires, for example, whether it is prevention, firefighting, or post-fire restoration,” says Chadi H. Mohanna, Director of Rural Development and Natural Resources, Ministry of Agriculture, Lebanon and Vice-Chair of Silva Mediterranea. 

The initiative takes a holistic approach to restoration that goes beyond reforestation to revive whole landscapes by engaging local communities, including youth and women, and helping them to improve their livelihoods. For example, healthy, well-managed forests of diverse native species deliver more benefits and better resist fire than single-species plantations. 

“In the past, reforestation in the Mediterranean region was primarily aimed at creating forest cover,” says Ümit Turhan, Deputy Head of Department, General Directorate of Forestry of Türkiye and Chair of Silva Mediterranea. “Today, our approach has pivoted, using forests and reforestation as essential components for landscape restoration.”  

Saving cedars 

In Lebanon, for instance, the Association for Forests, Development and Conservation is working to help people appreciate the benefits forests provide. Those include everything from food and firewood to water security and protection from natural disasters. The group also helps communities find new sources of income, for instance, by integrating trees into farmlands and developing ecotourism. 

Using everything from training courses to puppet shows, the programme also raises awareness of how those benefits are imperilled by fire, biodiversity loss and climate change, motivating communities to protect, restore and manage local forests. 

“The entry point is to really make people understand how protection of the ecosystem will contribute positively to their lives and to the lives of generations to come,” says Sawsan Bou Fakhreddine, Director General of the Association for Forests, Development and Conservation. 

Getting the message across helps attract the volunteers who are planting thousands of the seedlings growing in the association’s tree nurseries. Those same volunteers are managing local forests and staffing the fire crews that once inspired Wael Mostafa. 

Mostafa regularly takes charge of training new recruits at the association’s base near the Shouf Biosphere Reserve. The area is a stronghold of the threatened cedar tree that graces Lebanon’s flag and once covered much of the country. 

“I'm still a volunteer, I haven't stopped,” Mostafa says, after drilling volunteers into how to unroll the hoses from their fire truck. “When we are on call, we just have to be there, and I've never been sad because I don't have vacations or weekends. It's our duty and we just love doing it.”

About the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 

The UN General Assembly has declared 2021–2030 a UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Led by the UN Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, together with the support of partners, it is designed to prevent, halt, and reverse the loss and degradation of ecosystems worldwide. It aims at reviving billions of hectares, covering terrestrial as well as aquatic ecosystems. A global call to action, the UN Decade draws together political support, scientific research, and financial muscle to massively scale up restoration. 

About the UN World Restoration Flagships 

Countries have already promised to restore 1 billion hectares – an area larger than China – as part of their commitments to the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Aichi targets for biodiversity, the Land Degradation Neutrality targets and the Bonn Challenge. However, little is known about the progress or quality of this restoration. With the World Restoration Flagships, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is honouring the best examples of large-scale and long-term ecosystem restoration in any country or region, embodying the 10 Restoration Principles of the Decade. Progress of all World Restoration Flagships will be transparently monitored through the Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring, the UN Decade’s platform for keeping track of global restoration efforts.