RESTAURacción: Wildfire Restoration in Latin America, financed by Global Affairs Canada and led by the Canadian Forest Service through the International Model Forest Network Secretariat invested CAD $2.318 million in 2021 in the Latin American Model Forest Network and seven Model Forests spread over six countries of Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala and Peru).

In response to the numerous wildland fires that occurred in Latin America in 2019 and 2020, and delivering on Canada’s commitment at the 45th G7 Leaders’ Summit in Biarritz, France, RESTAURacción aims to:

• Advance women’s leadership in post-fire and degraded landscape ecosystem restoration;
• Plan and cost post-fire restoration; and
• Promote longer-term investments in sustainable land use

From January to March 2021, eight NRCan partners successfully accomplished the following:

• Installed 15 weather and/or monitoring stations;
• Established 196 long-term monitoring plots;
• Trained over 2400 people on forest fire management and control; gender equity, leadership and governance; forest landscape restoration implementation and monitoring in degraded areas (46% of people trained through RESTAURacción were women and girls);
• Provided 31 future restoration leaders with a scholarships to pursue research related to forest
• landscape restoration in degraded areas (87% of the scholarship holders are women);
• Enabled results-on-the-ground through 104 seeds for change, including diagnostics, action plans, financial and restoration proposals, studies, protocols and monitoring reports

RESTAURacción’s formula for success directly relates to the established governance platforms, the Model Forests, fostering close cooperation with local stakeholders, eager to contribute to the restoration of their landscapes. RESTAURacción results are scalable to all Model Forests that make up the Latin American Model Forest Network, and more broadly throughout the 60+ Model Forests in 30+ countries of the International Model Forest Network.

RESTAURacción is about putting forest restoration into action. Keeping with Canada’s response to natural disasters, ambitious commitments to climate action and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, RESTAURacción has engaged local stakeholders and created synergies with national and sub-national government political commitments such as Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) targets as part of the Bonn Challenge, the 20×20 Initiative, and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030. Learn more here.