After helping restore 18,500 hectares of degraded rainforest in Borneo over the past 25 years, Ikea has launched ‘The Living Rainforest Restoration Lab’.
Rather than focusing on planting more trees, the new program will focus on research and protecting biodiversity.
The initiative stems from the furniture retailer’s Sow a Seed project with its partners, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and the Sabah Foundation in Malaysia.
The original project began in 1998 after Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad proposed restoring a tropical rainforest in Borneo. It was partly funded through customer donations collected in Ikea stores, alongside company contributions.
Since then, the partners have restored and protected around 18,500 hectares of rainforest – an area larger than the city of Paris – making it one of the world’s largest and longest-running tropical rainforest restoration projects.
The restoration work included planting about 5 million seedlings of 90 native tree species and supporting the forest’s natural regeneration.
Over time, wildlife has returned to the area, including orangutans, pygmy elephants, clouded leopards, and hornbills.
Lena Julle, chief sustainability officer at Inter Ikea Group, said the project demonstrates that degraded rainforests can recover with long-term commitment.
“As the urgency to halt biodiversity loss grows, Sow a Seed shows what is possible: Degraded rainforests can recover,” Julle said.
“With the Living Rainforest Restoration Lab, we now want to share these insights more broadly, so they can help guide the restoration of other degraded rainforests around the world.”
Ikea will fund the research program for the next 10 years. The initiative includes 24 research projects led jointly by SLU and several Malaysian universities, making it one of the university’s largest ongoing research programmes.
Researchers will study how degraded tropical forests recover over time and identify the restoration methods that deliver the strongest long-term outcomes.
The program will also examine biodiversity recovery, carbon storage, water regulation, and soil health.
Ulrik Ilstedt, program leader at SLU, said the goal is to make restoration knowledge more widely available to governments, researchers, and practitioners.
“We aim to empower policymakers and the growing number of restoration practitioners with better knowledge, so that more rainforests can be restored more efficiently,” Ilstedt said.
Ikea said the Sow a Seed initiative operates independently of the company’s commercial value chain.
