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Environmental Stewardship

As weather-related impacts intensify, vulnerable children and families face growing risks to their health, livelihoods, and nutrition. World Vision is responding with locally driven and nature-based solutions that restore ecosystem services and resilience.

Growing Inequality in a Changing Climate

Extreme weather-related events and impacts — such as droughts, floods, and storms — are intensifying across all sectors and regions, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable. Between 1970 and 2019, weather, climate and water hazards accounted for 50% of all disasters, 45% of all reported deaths, and 74% of reported economic losses. More than 91% of these deaths occurred in developing countries.

The local effects of unpredictable precipitation and weather patterns are among the foremost challenges affecting the livelihoods, food security, and nutrition of smallholder farmers living in the world’s most vulnerable and fragile communities. The underlying causes of extreme poverty, combined with weather-related shocks and risks, exacerbate the fragile state of children’s and communities’ health, education, and long-term development outcomes. Nearly 1 billion children globally live in countries at extremely high risk of weather and environmental hazards, shocks, and stresses.

Our Commitment to Environmental Stewardship

World Vision recognizes that the degradation of natural resources — including land, water, and forests — as well as globally and locally induced weather patterns and shocks, are significant drivers of extreme poverty, malnutrition, inequality, and child vulnerability. We are committed to leveraging our resources and over 75 years of program experience to confront these challenges head-on and deliver positive results for vulnerable communities and natural environments.

The increasing frequency and intensity extreme weather events observed over the past 40 years places additional stress on children, women, and communities living in poverty. World Vision acknowledges that effectively addressing this crisis requires participation of communities in decision-making for development and the protection of the natural resources they rely on for their livelihoods.

To address these challenges, World Vision is prioritizing the following key areas of environmental stewardship and natural resource management (NRM):

Strengthening local capacity for Disaster Risk Reduction (planning, management, and preparedness)
Supporting existing national and local Early Warning Systems for timely and accurate messaging to reach local communities
Strengthening capacity for community led-watershed management
Supporting ecosystem restoration through nature-based solutions that enhance benefits in land, water, and tree management to improve productivity and livelihoods

In March 2021, World Vision issued our first Environmental Stewardship Management Policy to guide the organization-wide commitment to environmental sustainability. The policy ensures that all field programs, operations, facilities, and advocacy efforts contribute to healthier natural environments and minimize potential harm to the children and communities we serve. It also stipulates that World Vision field programing be based on appropriate and inclusive environmental assessment, design, implementation, and evaluation, considering all contextual realties and sector interventions.

World Vision’s global portfolio now includes over 1,100 projects across various thematic areas such as environment and natural resources management, agroforestry and Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), community-based disaster management, climate-smart agriculture, WASH, waste management, and energy-efficient technologies.

Environmental Stewardship FAQs

What are some examples of World Vision’s work in this area?

Ecosystems Restoration
While World Vision has a long history of working with communities, governments, the private sector, and civil society to improve environmental stewardship, in 2024 we launched our first environmental project focused on ecosystem restoration for smallholder farmers — emphasizing systems thinking and integrated management of land, water, and trees. The approach is designed to be scalable from the community to landscape level and is being implemented in two distinct agro-ecological zones of Chimanimani district, Zimbabwe.

The project aims to build the capacity of over 25,000 smallholder farmers — including more than 13,000 women — and their institutions to restore land and maintain a well-functioning local ecosystems. The expected outcomes include improved food and water security, increased productivity and enhanced livelihoods with minimal environmental footprint and risks in the local landscape and farming system.

Key outcomes include:

Strengthening the capacity of institutions, communities, and households to sustainably manage natural resources
Rehabilitating and restoring degraded communal lands and forests for productive use
Increasing and diversifying income-generating opportunities and building resilient livelihoods through regenerative agriculture

Farmer Managed Natural Resource Management (FMNR)
FMNR is a low-cost, community-led approach to sustainable land restoration that involves regrowing trees from living stumps through careful pruning and protection. Beyond land restoration, it is also a movement that helps address poverty, with communities that practice experiencing increased food and nutrition security, higher incomes (from firewood, fodder, and timber), and greater resilience to weather- and climate-related shocks. FMNR is recognized as one of the good agro-ecological practices by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN that supports communities to restore their natural environment in agricultural, pastoral and communal land and build the foundation for additional restoration activities. World Vision is actively contributing to up-scale FMNR, which is now practiced in about 40 countries. World Vision is also contributing to the goal of one billion hectares of degraded land by 2033.

Environmental Stewardship Research & Resources

Research

Leading barriers to climate-smart agriculture uptake in Kenya

This publication is part of a comprehensive research initiative titled "Climate Smart Agriculture: Assessment of Trends, Incentives, and Policy to Sustainably …

FSL

Reports

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration: A holistic approach to sustainable development

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) is a low-cost, sustainable land restoration technique that empowers poor farming communities to combat poverty and h…

FSL