The Road to Restoration: Restoring Australia’s Degraded Ecosystems
This report provides a national framework for restoring Australia’s degraded ecosystems, highlighting knowledge gaps, Indigenous leadership, policy and funding needs, threat mitigation, prioritisation tools, and strategies for scaling restoration. It outlines steps to build capacity, strengthen governance, and engage society in achieving effective, long‑term ecological recovery.
Subject Tags
- Indigenous Peoples
- Climate impacts
- Biodiversity
Executive Summary
Australia faces accelerating ecosystem degradation across terrestrial, inland water, coastal, and marine realms. The Road to Restoration synthesizes guidance from the 2024 ACIUCN National Ecosystem Restoration Workshop into an actionable roadmap to meet national targets by 2030. It calls for a cohesive policy framework, clear definitions of “priority areas” and “effective restoration,” and nationally consistent ecosystem mapping and condition assessments. The report centers Indigenous leadership and biocultural indicators, urges long‑term funding (on the order of 1% of GDP) to build a skilled restoration workforce and secure genetically diverse seed, and recommends threat mitigation focused on land clearing and invasive species. It outlines multi‑criteria tools to prioritize sites, standards‑based practice (SER), robust monitoring (GBF/FERM), and a shift from punitive to enabling incentives. Scaling requires coordinated governance, knowledge‑sharing infrastructure, and whole‑of‑society engagement to restore biodiversity, integrity, and connectivity at pace and scale.
Citation
Terkes, S., Orchard, S., Malcolm, L., Cochrane, P., Fitzsimons, J., Glamore, W., ... & Maitz, N. (2025). The Road to Restoration: Restoring Australia’s Degraded Ecosystems.
TNC Authors
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James Fitzsimons
Senior Advisor, Global Protection Strategies • Protect Oceans, Lands and Waters
The Nature Conservancy
Email: jfitzsimons@tnc.org