In mid-April 2025 Brazil as the chair of the BRICS grouping declared that the bloc would create a partnership for land restoration. The BRICS platform for land restoration is to be officially presented at the BRICS Leaders’ Summit in July 2025
In mid-April 2025 Brazil as the chair of the BRICS grouping declared that the bloc would create a partnership for land restoration. The BRICS platform for land restoration is to be officially presented at the BRICS Leaders’ Summit in July 2025. According to the statement of Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, “the initiative aims to coordinate efforts to restore degraded land, conserve soil, and use water resources more efficiently, based on scientific solutions and innovative financing mechanisms. With a focus on the Global South, the partnership seeks to engage governments, the private sector, and local communities in long-term restoration strategies”. This initiative may be one of the most important advances made by BRICS as a bloc throughout the past decade, with BRICS land restoration efforts potentially having palpable effect on global environmental efforts and the pursuit of sustainable economic growth by the economies of the Global South.
Back in October 2024 BRICS+ Analytics called for the creation of a global platform for land restoration, with the participation of BRICS economies. The idea was to bring together some of the leading economies in land restoration from the developing world, including the United Arab Emirates (a recent addition to the BRICS core membership), and to then scale up the advanced practices to the larger economies that are their regional partners and members of BRICS such as Brazil in South America, Saudi Arabia in Asia and Egypt in Northern Africa, Indonesia in Southeast Asia. The economies that were to serve as the leading forces of land restoration in the first phases of the creation of the platform were brought together under the acronym OASES (in line with the paradigm of reversing land degradation) – Oriental Republic of Uruguay, Austria, Switzerland, Emirates (UAE) and Singapore. The developing economies within this OASES platform were to scale up their practices to neighboring economies via the respective regional integration arrangements – in the case of Uruguay it was Mercosur, GCC in the case of UAE and ASEAN in the case of Singapore.
In the end, the creation of a land restoration platform for BRICS that by-passes the initial stage of developing advanced practices in the leading economies of the Global South makes sense and should be actively pursued by the BRICS bloc. This is because the BRICS economies (even more so after the BRICS expansion in membership) account for a significant share of global land area and in the three main regions of the Global South – Asia, Africa and Latin America. The BRICS have 4 economies in the top 10 in terms of the size of territory, with Russia accounting for nearly 11% of the world total, China at 6.3% and Brazil at 5.7%. The total for the 10 BRICS economies is more than 29% of the world total in terms of territory, more than 30% if Saudi Arabia is counted as part of BRICS and more than a third of the world total without counting Antarctica.
Even more importantly, the BRICS economies account for a significant part of the degraded land in the world economy and in the Global South. Some of the large BRICS economies have shares of degraded land that are notably higher than the average levels in their respective continents and in the world economy. According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), this in particular concerns such economies as South Africa (share of degraded land at more than 29.3%) and Ethiopia (close to 20%) in Africa (the continental average with some country omissions is around 12%); in Asia the share of land degradation in India is close to a third of the total, China has a share of 26.8% and Indonesia has 17.7%, with the regional average amounting to 17.3%; in Iran nearly 70% of the land area is under elevated risk of desertification; in Latin America Brazil is currently targeting efforts to reverse deforestation in the Amazon, while Mexico (a participant in BRICS+ meetings) has a share of degraded land that reaches nearly 72%.
BRICS economies such as Brazil together with China, India and Russia are also among the global leaders in agricultural production and a material improvement in land restoration efforts would greatly redound to their contribution to the amelioration of the environmental state of the global economy as well as the resolution of food security concerns across the developing world. The creation of a BRICS platform for land restoration could deliver important benefits to the world economy via job creation, greater sustainable investments, more scope for growth of the agricultural sector and a notable mitigation in climate-related costs.
The BRICS platform for land restoration could be further scaled up to the BRICS+ format include some of the other developing economies in need of reversing land degradation – this could be done via the respective regional integration arrangements. Such a regional approach also makes sense given the significant cross-country spillover effects associated with environmental factors, including with respect to land degradation. To render such a platform truly global, there could also be scope to invite the participation of advanced economies such as Switzerland that have already been active in supporting the efforts of developing economies in land restoration. The financing of initiatives within such a platform may be capital-intensive and will call for what we refer to as the NDB+ / ”syndicated regionalism” approach of creating platforms of development institutions – from national and regional development banks to RFAs, regional cohesion funds and SWFs. The global platform for co-financing such projects launched by the World Bank together with NDB in 2023 could form the basis for co-financing efforts from the world’s development institutions.
Overall, in terms of its impact, the creation of the BRICS platform for land restoration may prove to be the most significant initiative of the bloc in the past decade. The economic return on investment in land restoration may vary depending on the ecosystem, but given the multi-faceted impact of reversing soil degradation, existing estimates put potential returns at more than USD7 per each USD1 invested. At this crucial juncture for the world economy, a land restoration platform could strengthen BRICS leadership credentials in advancing sustainable economic policies on a global scale.
Yaroslav Lissovolik – Founder of BRICS+ Analytics.
