Governments have failed to agree on a global mechanism for tackling drought at a United Nations conference in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, despite warnings from scientists of an environmental crisis unfolding beneath our feet.
Talks at the COP16 conference of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) took place behind closed doors, but sources told Climate Home that, while Africa pushed hard for a legally binding drought protocol, the United States and others were opposed.
The host nation, Saudi Arabia, gavelled the summit to a close in the early hours of Saturday morning after the stalemate dragged the talks into overtime. Further debate was postponed to COP17 in 2026, which will take place in Mongolia.
“Parties need more time to agree on the best way forward as to how to address the critical issue of drought,” the UNCCD’s executive secretary Ibrahim Thiaw said at the closing session.
The delay jarred after a warning from scientists that three-quarters of the Earth’s land has become permanently drier over the past 30 years due to human activities and climate change. If the trend continues, it could lead to food shortages, increasing wildfires, large-scale forced migration and other devastation, the UNCCD report said.
But, at talks which attracted more attention than any of the previous bi-annual ‘land COPs’, governments did agree to establish official groupings for Indigenous peoples and local communities and to extend the UNCCD’s remit beyond drylands to cover pastoralism and the rangelands that make up half the Earth’s land surface.
Drought ‘sticking point’
The UNCCD is one of the three “Rio Conventions” born out of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to address environmental and development issues globally. The other two are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
On the opening day of COP16, just a few kilometres away from Saudi Arabia’s vast desert, an intergovernmental working group on drought put seven policy options on the table. They ranged from a legally binding protocol to a non-binding “global framework”. The draft protocol mentioned “provisions on resource mobilisation and financial mechanisms.”
The African Group’s president Khalid Cheriki told Climate Home before the negotiations began that the finance mobilised to deal with drought is “not sufficient” and that the group, which negotiates on behalf of African countries at the talks, “has been advocating for a legally binding protocol for drought for many years”.
The COP16 UNCCD talks took place in Riyadh in December 2024 (Photo: Anastasia Rodopoulou/IISD ENB)
Governments opposed to this position – including the United States, EU and Argentina – said they supported alternative solutions within the scope of existing frameworks, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a reporting service on UN environment and development negotiations.
A US government spokesman said that “a new international agreement to address the issue of drought is not the best approach. Droughts have local causes and as such do not require collective action. A one-size-fits-all global policy is not the most effective response.”
Jes Weigelt, managing director of think-tank TMG Research, who tracked the talks, said many countries outside Africa “see the preparatory process to develop such a protocol as being too resource-intensive and argue for using these resources to fight the impact of droughts.”
He told Climate Home that drought was a “sticking point” at the last COP in Côte d’Ivoire and questioned why the two years since were not used more effectively to find a compromise. “We are losing precious time,” he said.
Resilience fund
Nonetheless the summit did see some progress on finance. On its first day, the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership was launched, which aims to support 80 of the poorest nations in dealing with drought.
It attracted pledges of over $12 billion. Of this, $10 billion was offered by a coalition of Gulf-based development finance institutions called the Arab Coordination Group, as well as $1 billion each from the Islamic Development Bank and the OPEC Fund for International Development and a further $150 million from the Saudi Arabian government.
Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister for the environment, water and agriculture Osama Faqeeha said in a statement the partnership “will serve as a global facilitator for drought resilience, promoting the shift from reactive relief response to proactive preparedness.”
But this $12.15 billion is less than 0.5% of the $2.6 trillion that the UNCCD estimates is needed by 2030 to finance action against drought and land degradation.
Indigenous win
While it failed to reach agreement on a headline drought mechanism, the COP16 conference did approve 39 decisions, including to establish a “Caucus of Indigenous Peoples” and a “Caucus of Local Communities”.
Estrella Penunia, secretary-general of the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development, told Climate Home that these two groups would ensure peoples’ voices from those groups “can be always heard and considered in the UNCCD processes”.
The world is getting smaller for pastoralists facing multiple threats
In addition, governments agreed to extend the UNCCD’s remit beyond drylands to cover grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, savanna and tundra. These types of terrain are collectively known as rangelands and include everything that is not forest, lake, sea, rocks and ice.
Praveena Sridhar, chief technical officer of Save Soil, said this change was “very significant” as rangelands cover 70% of agricultural land and half of the Earth’s land surface.
Pastoralism, the herding of livestock, was also added to the UNCCD’s remit. Weigelt of TMG Research said pastoralists are “marginalised” and this decision is an “important step” to change the perception that they are “backward or incompatible with dominant ideas of development”.
While not attracting the numbers of the climate and nature COPs, the Riyadh talks included more participants and gained a higher profile than previous land COPs. The UNCCD’s chief scientist Barron Orr said land degradation had got less attention because of a lack of “iconic” images, while urbanisation means people interact with the soil less and many see it as “someone else’s problem”.
But land degradation affects everyone, and we can all help to stop it, Orr argued.“The clothes you’re wearing and I’m wearing, the coffee we drank this morning, probably contributed to land degradation somewhere else in the world,” he added.
Xiaoying You’s travel, accommodation and food was funded by Saudi Arabia’s COP16 Presidency
The post As earth dries out, countries fail to reach drought agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.
As Earth dries out, countries fail to reach drought agreement
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectations
An exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
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Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidies
In the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries who have not submitted a biodiversity plan yet to finalise them “as soon as possible” and taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
“Timid” steps to expand base of donors
Having failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said during one of the sessions that her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, also noted their dissatisfaction but said it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
Cali Fund still not operational
Adopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
The post COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this