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
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.
