The UN's 29 October 2026 Restoration Report Lists Ganges River Dolphins in India Among the Species Recoveries Documented in Its 35 World Restoration Flagships, Alongside Mountain Gorillas and Snow Leopards

A UN report released on 29 October 2026 names Ganges river dolphins in India among the species recovering inside its World Restoration Flagships, next to mountain gorillas in East Africa, jaguars in Brazil and snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity published it as Nature’s Comeback, at the COP17 biodiversity conference in Yerevan, Armenia, UNEP’s press release says.

The report is the first assessment of restoration progress across every type of ecosystem. It sits at the midpoint of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which runs from 2021 to 2030.

What the report counts

FAO, UNEP and the CBD secretariat document about 252 million hectares as under restoration in 2026, across 149 countries. UNEP’s story compares that area to Kazakhstan, and the press release calls it the largest documented global restoration effort to date, with more than one million green jobs created.

Asia accounts for 192.2 million hectares of the total, and China reports the largest terrestrial area, 127.4 million hectares. The report says its regional figures reflect the scale of activity and of reporting, and do not rank countries on performance.

Where the dolphins appear

The dolphins come up in a box on the UN World Restoration Flagships. Those are 35 government-backed restoration initiatives that the UN Decade selected for their ambition, scale and capacity to be copied elsewhere. Together they report 18 million hectares under restoration, more than 1.1 million jobs and more than 1.2 million people trained, the report says. The same box lists species recovery in the flagship landscapes: mountain gorillas, jaguars, snow leopards, Ganges river dolphins in India, golden-headed lion tamarins in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, and saiga antelope and wild horses in Kazakhstan’s Altyn Dala.

The report gives no dolphin count of its own. UNEP’s press release names four of these species, the dolphins among them, as documented successes among the flagships.

India’s entry in the UN Decade’s flagship list is Namami Gange, the government’s Ganga rejuvenation programme run by the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG). The UN named it one of 10 inaugural flagships on 13 December 2022, in Montreal, during the UN Biodiversity Conference. The Decade’s page for the flagship says it is supported by the World Bank, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the German development agency. It puts the area under restoration at 30,000 hectares, against a 2030 target of 135,000.

Some Indian current-affairs sites describe the dolphin work as a separate flagship. Drishti IAS, for one, describes a dolphin recovery programme as one of the 35 flagships. The UN Decade’s list has 35 initiatives and none is a dolphin programme. The dolphins are a named recovery inside Namami Gange.

The dolphin work behind the listing

UNEP’s 2023 story describes the flagship as sewage treatment, tree planting along the river and community work, and the Decade’s page says it aims to revive river dolphins, softshell turtles, otters and hilsa shad. The story also quotes the conservationist Goura Chandra Das, who monitors the river’s wildlife, saying that after talks with local communities, fishers had begun rescuing dolphins caught in their nets and releasing them.

Three pieces of the record are dated and checkable:

• Tree planting. The NMCG said in June 2026 that its afforestation project along the Ganga main stem had covered 33,024 hectares, and the Jal Shakti ministry gave the same area, across five Ganga basin states, in a Lok Sabha reply on 30 July 2026.
• A rescue vehicle. India’s first Dolphin Rescue Ambulance was launched in January 2026 at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Dehradun. The NMCG said on 7 May 2026 that it had rescued and released eight Ganga dolphins, PTI reported, and the ministry’s July reply lists it among the programme’s outcomes.
• Counting. India’s first national river dolphin estimate, released on 3 March 2025, found 6,327 river dolphins in 28 rivers across eight states, of which 6,324 are Ganges river dolphins and 3 are Indus river dolphins, according to PIB and WII. WII’s range for the total is 5,980 to 6,691. Our piece on Project Dolphin and the first national count covers the state-by-state figures and the method.

Our look at what Namami Gange has built and measured covers the sewage and water-quality side of the same programme, and the gharial’s comeback covers another species the mission names.

What the counts can show

The 2021 to 2023 survey is a first national figure, which makes it a baseline. ThePrint wrote on 3 November 2026 that it gives a starting point and is not proof of recovery. The IUCN Red List, which last assessed the species on 1 August 2021, lists it as Endangered worldwide, with a population trend of decreasing.

A comparison is on its way. The Environment Ministry started a second range-wide survey from Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh on 17 January 2026, with 26 researchers in three boats. PIB says it follows the same method as the first round and adds new stretches, plus Irrawaddy dolphins in the Sundarbans and Odisha. The first phase covers the Ganga main stem from Bijnor to Ganga Sagar and the Indus. The second phase covers the Brahmaputra, the Ganga’s tributaries, the Sundarbans and Odisha. No results had been published in the sources checked as of 6 November 2026.

The wider finding

The report presents the 252 million hectares as progress and also as short of the goal. UNEP’s story says the world is off track for the 2030 target of putting 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems under restoration, because 252 million hectares is 34 per cent of the indicative global benchmark. On land the reported area has reached almost half of the target, marine and coastal ecosystems 23 per cent and freshwater about 5 per cent, UNEP’s story says. FAO’s summary gives the freshwater share as 4.5 per cent.

UNEP’s Executive Director Inger Andersen said in the press release that “we are still not restoring nature at the scale or speed required”. Traceable restoration finance reached about US$64 billion in 2022, FAO’s summary says, and the report says annual investment must rise to US$296 billion by 2030.