The topic of land restoration (including indigenous/​traditional and scientific knowledge) should be included in different disciplines in tertiary education institutions (eg., remote sensing, statistics, agriculture) as well as primary and secondary education. Policymakers, practitioners and users need better training/​awareness on restoration practices.

The fourth session of the G20 convention on land restoration focused on community restoration: its approaches and challenges.

The voluntary carbon offsetting market is taking off after a slow start and bringing significant resources into the restoration market and is estimated to be tens of billions of dollars per year by 2030, with prices for quality projects of at least at 30 USD/​Ton by 2030.

Ensuring more resources for land restoration requires a set of enabling factors which this paper addresses, namely: financing, policies, regulation and technologies.

Recently, the Government of Karnataka along with Azim Premji University, LibTech India, ATREE and the Foundation for Ecological Security has initiated work towards understanding the avenues for aligning MGNREGA with the goal of ecological restoration. This work was done as a pilot project in Chikkabalapur district of Karnataka.

Restoring 150 million hectares of degraded agricultural land could generate USD 85 billion in net benefits to national and local economies, raise USD 30 – 40 billion a year in extra income for smallholder farmers, and provide additional food for close to 200 million people.

It is obvious that different socio-economic and institutional factors impact land restoration in a country. These may include laws and their enforcement, economic incentives of people which in turn are determined by national and international markets and government policies; actions of organisations that are involved in restoration, etc.

The human development indicators of most Indian states are low. The development of the manufacturing sector is slow (though there has been higher economic growth during the last 3 — 4 decades) and this has slowed the transition of a land-dependent population towards industries and urban areas. All these work against the efforts towards the restoration of land in rural areas.

There is a need for an education that can address these epistemic inequalities and cultivate open-mindedness. I see Intercultural Education as a possible solution. ​‘Intercultural Education is the response to classroom diversity aiming to go beyond passive coexistence, to achieve a developing and sustainable way of living together in multicultural societies through the creation of an understanding of respect for and a productive dialogue between the different groups.’