Landscape Restoration Scale Up

Project Objective: ​ Increase adoption of climate-smart, landscape restoration practices and access to income earning opportunities. At its core, the project aims to secure the climate adaptation potential of currently degraded landscapes by reinforcing ecosystems that will provide essential services to local communities, such as: soil erosion mitigation through revegetation, water conservation in the soils, increased soil nutrients for crop production, among other key ecosystem services of the croplands, grasslands and shrublands of the project intervention sites.

Mali is among the world's least developed and most climate-vulnerable countries, where 80 percent of the rural population depends directly on agriculture, pastoralism, forestry, and fisheries for their livelihoods. These communities are on the frontlines of worsening climate hazards — increasingly erratic and intense rainfall, prolonged droughts, rising temperatures, and flash flooding — that are already reducing agricultural yields, disrupting pastoral mobility, depleting water availability, and eroding the natural resource base on which rural survival depends. Land degradation, energy poverty, and institutional fragility compound these climate impacts, accelerating ecosystem decline and deepening vulnerability. The climate adaptation potential of the intervention areas is undermined by the current energy dependence on wood biomass, driving deforestation, and depleting the ecosystem services that the natural ecosystems would otherwise offer to rural farming communities that would make them more climate resilient. In order to address this climate adaptation challenge, targeted interventions in the energy sector (through the promotion and capacity building in the use of more sustainable wood fuel and cooking methods), Without deliberate intervention, the adaptive capacity of rural communities will continue to erode, pushing households into a climate-driven poverty trap from which recovery becomes increasingly difficult.

Building on and related to the climate adaptation challenges, gender inequality both deepens climate vulnerability and constrains adaptation outcomes in the project area. Women constitute the primary managers of household food production, water collection, fuelwood gathering, and natural resource use, roles that place them on the frontlines of climate stress , yet they face structural barriers that limit their capacity to adapt. Land tenure insecurity is the most critical gender gap identified in the project's Gender Analysis: while Mali's legal framework formally protects women's rights, customary tenure systems dominate in practice, with women typically cultivating land on the basis of temporary, revocable arrangements rather than recognized rights. Over half of women beneficiaries surveyed under the parent project cultivate about 0.5 hectares, and few hold documentary proof of any land rights, leaving them acutely vulnerable to exclusion from the benefits of restoration investments made on land they do not formally control. With 84 percent of surveyed women having no formal education, barriers to navigating administrative, governance, and market systems are compounded further. The AF directly addresses these structural constraints as a condition for achieving durable adaptation outcomes.

The RESILAND Mali Additional Financing (AF) is a child project under the RESILAND programme, building on three years of validated implementation to scale up an integrated landscape management approach. The parent project has achieved a 49 percent disbursement rate under significant security and logistical constraints, placing over 580,000 hectares under enhanced management, validating 87 communal development plans, operationalizing a national MRV system, and supporting approximately 463,000 beneficiaries. Community demand has consistently outpaced available resources, with over 2,000 subproject proposals submitted, providing a clear basis for scaling up while delivery systems and community trust are already established. The urgency of scaling up is reinforced by deteriorating climate conditions: communities in the project areas are already reporting reduced crop yields, shorter growing seasons, and more frequent water stress, confirming that the window for effective adaptation investment is narrowing.

The AF is organized around three mutually reinforcing components.

Component 1: Institutional Support and Capacity Building (LDCF: US$1.40 million) will strengthen the institutional architecture and capacity required to sustain restoration outcomes beyond the project lifecycle. Activities include (i) training at least 70 additional participants through the master's program in Sustainable Development Engineering; (ii) deploying AI-based forest inventory systems, drones, and digital monitoring tools and; (iii) training at least 400 forest stakeholders on legal and regulatory frameworks, targeting at least 45 percent women participants, with training content adapted for low-literacy audiences through local languages, radio, and visual tools, and specifically covering women's rights under natural resource governance frameworks and the legal instruments — including the Commissions Foncières (CoFo) — available to secure women's access to land and forest resources. The project will support the creation or revitalization of CoFo with a minimum 40 percent women's participation threshold in supported local governance bodies, and will conduct structured dialogue with customary authorities and male allies on women's land and resource rights.; strengthening the Agency for Environment and Sustainable Development (AEDD); installing solar energy systems in selected Regional Directorates; and implementing restoration activities under at least three forest management plans. This will enable near-real-time tracking of climate-driven landscape change and providing the evidence base needed for adaptive management of restoration and agricultural interventions under shifting climatic conditions. Indeed, these activities directly build climate adaptation capacity by restoring the hydrological functions, soil moisture retention, and microclimate regulation that communities depend on to manage drought and flood risk.

Component 2: Investments in Landscape Restoration and Community Resilience (LDCF: US$6.35 million) will scale up community-driven climate adaptation through ecosystem restoration and livelihood diversification, directly reducing the exposure and sensitivity of rural households to climate hazards including drought, erratic rainfall, and land degradation. At least 15 additional subprojects will finance agroforestry, assisted natural regeneration, soil and water conservation, and restoration of pastoral areas and degraded ecosystems. Each of these interventions has been selected for its demonstrated role in reducing climate risk: agroforestry systems buffer temperature extremes and improve soil moisture retention; assisted natural regeneration restores hydrological function in degraded catchments; soil and water conservation structures mitigate the impacts of intense rainfall events; and pastoral area restoration restores the mobility corridors that allow pastoralists to respond adaptively to rainfall variability. Livelihood support will include two additional productive alliances in non-timber forest product (NTFP) value chains, one additional productive alliance in fisheries and aquaculture, and two additional integrated agro-sylvo-pastoral farms (FACIs). Livelihood interventions are explicitly designed to address the gender-differentiated barriers that exclude women from economic opportunity in green value chains. Women are primary actors in non-timber forest product collection and processing, and in fisheries-adjacent activities, yet face persistent barriers to equipment, storage, market access, and finance. Productive alliances supported under this component will prioritize women-led groups in high-value NTFP value chains, combining productive support with business coaching, matching grants, savings mechanisms, and financial literacy, recognizing that access to markets alone is insufficient without addressing the underlying constraints on women's economic agency.

A new sub-component on Climate Adaptation and Clean Energy Solutions addresses one of the most direct climate-livelihood linkages in rural Mali: as drought and land degradation reduce agricultural and pastoral income, households increase their dependence on charcoal and fuelwood, which, in turn, accelerates deforestation, further amplifying climate vulnerability. By supporting three productive alliances targeting sustainable green charcoal, solar cooking, and biomass briquettes, this sub-component breaks that feedback loop, simultaneously reducing pressure on forest carbon stocks that moderate local climate, generating alternative income for climate-affected households, and improving household energy resilience.

Relatedly, women and girls bear a disproportionate share of these compounding burdens. In rural Mali, women are the primary managers of household food production, water collection, and fuelwood gathering, roles that place them on the frontlines of climate and land degradation impacts yet are structurally undervalued and under protected. Insecure land access is the most critical gender gap in the project area: while national legal frameworks are formally favorable, customary tenure systems dominate in practice, with men typically inheriting land while women cultivate based on temporary, revocable arrangements. Over half of women beneficiaries surveyed under the parent project cultivate about 0.5 hectares, and few hold documentary proof of land rights, leaving them acutely vulnerable to losing access to the very land on which restoration investments are made. With 84 percent of surveyed women beneficiaries having no formal education or literacy, barriers to navigating administrative and governance processes are compounded further. Addressing these structural constraints is not a secondary objective: without women's secure access to land and resources, and their meaningful participation in governance, restoration investments cannot achieve lasting outcomes.

Component 3: Coordination, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Safeguards (LDCF: US$0.30 million) will reinforce project management, environmental and social safeguards monitoring, grievance redress, and results reporting across all project levels.

The AF is fully aligned with Mali's NDC, REDD+ strategy, and Land Degradation Neutrality targets, and directly supports national commitments to restore 325,000 hectares of forests and develop climate-smart agriculture across 92,000 hectares. By blending LDCF and PROGREEN resources around a proven delivery platform, the AF maximizes efficiency and impact while avoiding fragmentation.