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Introduction

Ethiopia has set a high bar for itself, and the world: in its development blueprint, the Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) Strategy, it aims to achieve middle-income status by 2025 while transitioning to a climate-resilient green economy.

Protecting existing forest and promoting tree-based landscape restoration are central to these goals as trees contribute not only directly to economic development and higher living standards, but also to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Increasing the number of trees will also contribute to Ethiopia’s international commitments, including to the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, and the African (AFR100) and global (Bonn Challengeand New York Declaration on Forests) restoration targets.

While trees have played a significant role in many of Ethiopia's successful restoration initiatives, tree-based landscape restoration needs to be scaled up if Ethiopia is going to meet its ambitious goals.

No single governmental or nongovernmental institution can singlehandedly scale up tree-based landscape restoration in agricultural, pastoral and forest landscapes to regain needed ecological functionality and achieve targeted standards of living across Ethiopia. Scaling up the restoration of degraded landscapes will require many state and non-state actors to act in concert.

Version 0.0 of the National Tree-Based Landscape Restoration Potential and Priority Maps presented here constitutes a first step in coordinating Ethiopia’s large-scale restoration efforts. The maps aim to guide decision-makers as to where additional trees could benefit Ethiopian landscapes; which tree-based landscape restoration options could be implemented in these landscapes; and where to prioritize cross-sectoral implementation. The maps are the product of a cross-sectoral effort of national and regional experts led by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MEFCC).

About the national potential and priority maps

National and regional experts mapped eight tree-based landscape restoration options seen as key for Ethiopia to reach her economic, social and environmental goals:

Restoring secondary forests
Restocking degraded natural forests
Agri-silviculture and agro-silvo-pastoralism
Silvo-pastoralism
Woodlots and home gardens
Commercial plantations for products other than industrial roundwood (complementing the potential for industrial roundwood plantation mapped previously)
Buffer plantations around protected areas and national forest priority areas
Tree-based buffer zones along rivers, lakes, and reservoirs

The eight individual options were spatially overlaid to map combined potential for tree-based landscape restoration, which indicates the potential for trees irrespective of the option. Based on the criteria and data used in this work, a total of 82 million hectares was identified as having combined potential for tree-based landscape restoration.

In addition to mapping potential for tree-based landscape restoration, national and regional experts generated a map that prioritizes landscapes for cross-sectoral implementation of tree-based landscape restoration. While restoration by individual sectors contributes independently to Ethiopia’s national and international restoration objectives, experts identified certain landscapes requiring a cross-sectoral approach. It is important to note that areas that have restoration potential but are not prioritized for cross-sectoral implementation must nonetheless be given due attention by the individual relevant sectors.

About version 0.0 of the Atlas

The current version of the Atlas presents version 0.0 of the combined potential for tree-based landscape restoration as well as version 0.0 of the prioritization of the potential for cross-sectoral implementation. The technical report details how the national potential and priority maps were developed. It also presents the accuracy assessment of version 0.0 of the potential maps in four woredas, which highlights the limitations of the individual potential maps (in contrast to the combined potential map). The MEFCC is committed to improving and updating the potential maps over time. Future iterations of these maps will reliably depict potential for individual options on the ground and will be available on the Atlas.

Restoration actors should be aware of the limitations of the potential maps highlighted in the technical report and the absence of validation of the priority landscapes map.

The responsibility for delivering on the ambitious Climate Resilient Green Economy lies with many actors, governmental and nongovernmental. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change hopes that this version and future iterations of the national maps, together with the ten-year National Forest Sector Development Program, will help provide a common vision regarding tree-based landscape restoration for all actors.

Navigating the Atlas

There are four tabs in the left menu bar. The first one, “Narrative”, provides users a general description of the combined potential maps. A more detailed description can be found in the technical report.

The second tab, “Layers”, allows users to visualize the extent of combined potential for tree-based landscape restoration and provides contextual information that could influence how to implement restoration, such as current land use-land cover, slope, population density, tree cover and average annual rainfall.

The third tab, “Data”, allows users to select a Woreda, a Zone, a Region, or a priority landscape for cross-sectoral implementation, or to create their area of interest for which to calculate area statistics regarding land use-land cover, slope, population density, tree cover and average annual rainfall. These statistics are displayed in the fourth tab, “Analyze”, and can be downloaded as a report.

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