Inger Andersen is Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme
When you live on the edge, you become acutely aware of balance.
As a young woman straight out of university in 1982, I had the privilege of teaching English at a Sudanese girls’ high school. After a couple of years, I landed a job supporting the emergency and relief work during the Sudanese drought and associated famine.
Those communities in Sudan knew very well that their two most precious assets were the acacia trees on their lands and the seeds saved for next year’s planting season.
Acacia fixes nitrogen in the soil – a natural fertiliser – while the gum Arabic from the trees is an income source. But when drought hits and all animals are sold, and the last of the food is eaten, the only thing left is to cut and sell the trees for firewood and charcoal. Once the trees are gone, the last thing left is the seeds. And once the seeds have been sacrificed for food, nothing is left.
After witnessing the devastating impacts of this famine, working on development and environmental sustainability became my life’s calling.
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From projects in Kordofan and Darfur in Sudan, to Northern Uganda, Somalia, and the arid and semiarid lands of Tanzania and Kenya, I saw how long-term solutions could help move us beyond just a humanitarian response. Because nature is incredibly generous, if we allow it to be.
Solutions like re-establishing the gum arabic trees with communities in Western Sudan, to working on water harvesting in arid lands. Supporting “cut and carry” schemes to replace animal grazing, a major driver of land degradation and the associated desertification. Or re-introducing the old pre-colonial approach of “al-hima”, a practice known by dryland communities for hundreds of years that protects and allows fragile land to rest, optimising soil health and land management.
Land – and its fragility – teaches us a lot. Dryland communities around the world have spent generations adapting to extremes. History that allows pastoralists, farmers, Indigenous Peoples and local communities to understand the deep interconnections between land, water, biodiversity and livelihoods.
Today climate change is pushing these finely balanced systems beyond what they can withstand. As extreme and compounding impacts intensify, the margins for resilience are shrinking, meaning landscapes, livelihoods, and communities are being pushed closer to their limits.
Land degradation now affects 3.2 billion people. Desertification impacts 45 per cent of Africa’s land. Around 95 per cent of the food we eat depends on land, while by 2050, water scarcity could affect more than three-quarters of the global population.
As migration and security rise rapidly on the global agenda, we must also recognise the role that healthy – and degraded – land can play. Healthy, productive landscapes can strengthen resilience and stability. Degraded land can deepen insecurity, intensify competition for resources and leave people with fewer options, including whether they stay or move.
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Land also shows us how interconnected our future is. We know the answer is not a simple, single-issue solution. We need to bring together science, local knowledge and multilateral cooperation to understand thresholds, navigate trade-offs and – ultimately – work with nature rather than against it.
This approach is at the heart of the World Restoration Flagships programme under the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, led by the UN Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It recognises ambitious restoration initiatives that show what is possible when we move beyond protecting individual ecosystems to restoring landscapes at scale – halting land degradation, supporting livelihoods and strengthening resilience to climate change.
Now we must build on this work. A ‘Rio Trio’ year – with talks across land, biodiversity and climate change – creates a unique opportunity to put land at the centre of a more integrated response. As the first of these negotiations, COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, can help set that direction and deliver greater global ambition on desertification, land degradation and drought.
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Drought will be a key topic. Our challenge remains shifting from reactive crisis response to prevention – stopping drought before it becomes a disaster. The Great Green Wall, a World Restoration Flagship, reminds us the most effective drought solutions are not emergency measures, but long-term investments in healthy landscapes.
That is why collective action on land is such a powerful opportunity. Land is not one issue among many. It is where climate, nature, food, water and security come together. And the places that have lived on the edge for the longest may hold the blueprint for how we can all learn to thrive within the planet’s limits.
Quite simply, land is life.
As leaders meet in Ulaanbaatar over the next week, we must remember investing in healthy land is an investment in food, health and water security, as well as peace and economic growth.
The future of people and planet will be shaped by the health of the land beneath our feet. If we restore land, so the Acacia trees across the world can grow, we restore hope in a future for every community.
The post How safeguarding land protects our future appeared first on Climate Home News.
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.