The United Nations’ 17th Conference of the Parties in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, has once again brought together an array of countries to battle climate change. But this COP edition is focused on a unique element of the shifting environment: desertification. As more fertile land degrades into dry, barren desert, the meeting is workshopping climate solutions using its key anti-desertification treaty, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
While the U.N. is working on a cohesive plan to fight desertification, the main goal of the Mongolia conference is to “put pledges made two years ago into action through projects in the developing world,” said The Guardian. A plan like this will involve “allocating more than $12 billion to vulnerable countries to help them deal with drought and land degradation,” specifically in countries that don’t have many resources to fight climate change.
The “biannual talks on desertification have taken on far greater importance in the wake of recent heatwaves and wildfires in the Northern Hemisphere, Europe and Asia,” said French radio broadcaster RFI. The $12 billion pledge is also “small compared to the needs — about $2.6 trillion by 2030,” which would be required to “repair degraded land, halt desertification, protect against drought and restore soils.” There’s also a push to focus more on the UNCCD, which has been “garnering the least attention” of three environmental treaties signed in the 1990s, said The Guardian.
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The need for additional funding appears dire, as “up to 40% of the world’s land is currently degraded,” said the U.N. regional information center’s site. Beyond desertification causing environmental damage, it can also “reduce food production and water availability, undermine livelihoods and increase economic and social vulnerability.” The “choice of Mongolia as host for COP17 brings particular significance to this year’s conference,” as the U.N. estimates that at least 77% of the country’s land is degraded, making “sustainable management a pressing national concern.”
Solutions are being worked on in Mongolia as countries around the world are “bracing for food price rises as a result of damage to harvests from record heat and lack of water,” said The Guardian. The U.N.’s World Food Programme also “predicts that 50 million more people could be pushed into hunger by the ‘super El Niño’ weather system currently developing.” Better implementation of anti-desertification funds will be needed, as “initiatives to restore land and prevent drought have up to now been poorly funded and badly managed.”
What next?
Many are hoping that the conference will help propel the UNCCD more into the foreground. It is currently the only one of three U.N. environmental treaties from the 1990s in which the U.S. “remains a full party” and is “one of the last multilateral arenas for environmental diplomacy,” said Jean-Daniel Cesaro, a member of the French Scientific Committee on Desertification, to Le Monde. It is “crucial to keep it alive and maintain dialogue and reflection on these issues, which are essential to our future.”
COP17 is slated to run until Aug. 28. Major funding announcements are “generally made at climate COPs, even when they are closely linked to land management,” said Cesaro. The rest of the conference should be used to “remind everyone that science remains, above all, a space for dialogue in a world that more than ever needs healthy land and living ecosystems to face climate change.”
