Leaders in action : achieving forest landscape restoration through online learning

Forest landscape restoration (FLR) provides an opportunity to transform degraded lands into productive landscapes that yield numerous ecological, economic, and social benefits. Many countries have made large-scale commitments under the Bonn Challenge, but with such large targets, it is challenging to determine where to begin – and how to approach – the restoration process. From May 2016 to March 2017, the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and IUCN conducted a series of six online courses, entitled “Forest Landscape Restoration in the Tropics.” ELTI and IUCN offered these courses in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French to 125 environmental practitioners from over 30 countries. The objectives of this collaboration were to develop the capacity of diverse practitioners working on FLR in tropical developing countries, support future leaders of FLR and ROAM initiatives, and accelerate action on FLR and ROAM to meet countries’ pledges to the Bonn Challenge. This booklet includes a collection of inspirational stories from alumni of the ELTI-IUCN online courses that illustrate the diverse ways in which they have made profound and positive impacts that they attribute to their participation in these courses.