About

Our Mission

Restor aims to grow the global restoration movement by connecting everyone, everywhere to local restoration. Restor serves as a hub for restoration, connecting people to scientific data, supply chains, funding, and each other, to increase the impact, scale, and sustainability of restoration efforts. We believe that anyone can be a restoration champion, including you.

In October, Professor Tom Crowther announced Restor and our mission behind the platform during the TED Countdown Event.

Our Story

Ecosystem restoration and conservation are crucial for protecting Earth’s biodiversity and achieving climate mitigation goals. Restoration has the potential to draw down ~30% of accumulated global carbon emissions and is a key component of many nations’ climate mitigation goals by 2030. However, the biggest impacts are often felt most acutely at the local scale and where people depend on biodiversity for their livelihoods. Protecting and rebuilding ecosystems are therefore local challenges, but the right scientific data and resources are often inaccessible, and where they are available, they are spread across a mix of outlets.

As a global ecological research group, the Crowther Lab at ETH Zürich knows the benefits of access to data and also the pitfalls of data when not paired with local knowledge. They set out to create a unified platform to democratize ecological data to ensure that the best restoration data is created by, for, and with restoration practitioners. From that aim, Restor was seeded in 2019, germinated over the course of 2019 and 2020, and is launching in 2021.

With the right data, along with full transparency, local restoration projects can now connect to an ever-growing network of global restoration action. Restoration takes many forms, from the protection of land so that vegetation can flourish, to the holistic soil management, to agroforestry, to tree planting, to wetlands protection, and many more. It is also practiced in many ways, whether through indigenous cosmologies, as a part of regenerative agriculture, within supply chains, or via backyard experiments. Regardless of whether we are currently practicing restoration, whoever we are, we all have a ‘land footprint,’ that extends beyond our carbon emissions to our impacts on soil, biodiversity, and natural systems. It is our goal to make it possible for us all to understand the land footprint associated with our decisions. Through this process we aim to foster interest, understanding, and action to regenerate what has been degraded, and to make decisions that will benefit natural ecosystems. Every one of us can make a difference, one decision at a time.