Any societal problem can be addressed by restoration actions, and the degree to which the societal problem is addressed is dependent on the restoration goals of the project. Ideally, your restoration project should address multiple societal problems.  

Restoration has been highlighted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a crucial tool to prevent and reverse landscape degradation, protect climate, promote biodiversity enhancement, ecosystem services, and to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also states the need for restoration to reduce carbon emissions and to support climate change adaptation and mitigation.  

The easiest way to restore nature is to use local nature as a template for your NbS. You may want to restore key biotopes, a specific vegetation type or habitat, or remove a specific invasive alien species. Thus, the methods used for different restoration actions in different ecosystems and contexts are highly variable. There are, however, some general principles and guidelines for ecological restoration. This handbook also covers existing Guidance and tools for NbS which may be of interest to help you plan your restoration project. 

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’s Best Practices Task Force, the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Commission on Ecosystem Management (IUCN CEM) and the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) have suggested ten principles of ecological restoration, which can be used to guide restoration throughout the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030. The ten principles state that good ecosystem restoration: 

1. contributes to global policy frameworks
2. promotes fair and inclusive engagement
3. includes a continuum of restorative activities
4. aims at the highest recovery possible to benefit nature and people
5. addresses the causes of degradation
6. incorporates all types of knowledge
7. sets ecological, cultural and socio-economic goals
8. tailors activities to local and land/seascape contexts
9. measures results and adapts actions
10. integrates policies and measures for lasting impacts  

You can read more about these principles in the FAO’s Standards of practice to guide ecosystem restoration. 

In this handbook, you will find multiple examples of NbS with elements of restoration in them. These include: 

Regardless of the type of societal problem that you wish to address with your restoration action, you should have a plan for how you wish to enhance biodiversity. Biodiversity encompasses the variety of life in all its forms, including species diversity, genetic variation, and ecosystem diversity. In each NbS, it is important to consider the context-specific potential that is determined by ecosystem characteristics.  

We encourage users of this handbook to fully realize the biodiversity potential within the specific context of the ecosystem and to set clear biodiversity targets that can be followed over time. Specifically, this means that you should have an idea about what species you are restoring the landscape for, and how, rather than hoping to increase the number of species present in your landscape as a by-product of the restoration action itself. This approach may cause an increase in biodiversity, but not of the species that are desirable in that ecosystem type, and may cause unwanted consequences for biodiversity. 

Restoration science and practice is a field with a long history, but there are still many new concepts and theories that are needed to understand potential conflicts arising from an upscaling of restoration activities.  

Ecosystem restoration involves diverse activities with large variation in restoration targets, value considerations, spatial and temporal scale. The level of degradation, as well as environmental conditions, available resources, and socio-economic factors, is essential for deciding on restoration targets and interventions needed to achieve them.  

Restoration to compensate for habitat loss, within the no-net-loss context, has recently become more explicit, along with the need for evidence for improved ecological conditions in ecologically degraded sites.