COP16 to Address Global Land Degradation and Desertification Begins in Saudi Arabia

Following the recent United Nations biodiversity and climate conferences, the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) began Monday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with the goal of tackling drought, desertification and land degradation.

The UN has found that, in order to restore the planet’s degraded lands and prevent desertification, an investment of at least $2.6 trillion will be needed by 2030.

“We depend on our land for survival. Yet, we treat it like dirt,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a press release from UNCCD.

The 12-day summit seeks to respond to drought in the face of climate change while protecting and restoring the world’s lands. The most recent previous UNCCD meeting — in 2022 in the Ivory Coast — yielded a promise for “accelerating the restoration of one billion hectares of degraded land by 2030,” reported AFP.

“Even if the global geopolitical context overshadows these crucial meetings, this kind of astral conjunction may perhaps lead to concrete decisions,” said Mauro Centritto, a sustainable plant protection expert with Italy’s National Research Council who is representing civil society organizations from Western Europe in Riyadh, as Le Monde reported.

According to Centritto, it is time to “build synergies” to connect the three COP conferences, as global heating is likely to pass the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels established in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“If we don’t fight together against increasing droughts and advancing land degradation, we will never achieve the goals we have set ourselves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect flora and fauna,” Centritto added.

At the COP16 gathering of 196 nations and the European Union, UNCCD said 1.5 billion hectares must now be restored by 2030 to combat escalating droughts and other crises, reported AFP.

One day prior to the COP16 conference in Saudi Arabia — a desert nation — a new UNCCD scientific report warned that degraded soils and forest loss were lowering resilience to biodiversity loss and climate change.

“If we fail to acknowledge the pivotal role of land and take appropriate action, the consequences will ripple through every aspect of life and extend well into the future,” Ibrahim Thiaw, UNCCD executive secretary, said in a press release from the World Meteorological Organization.

The degradation of Earth’s lands disrupts ecosystems while making the land less agriculturally productive, which leads to food shortages and migration.

Land is considered to be degraded when human activities such as deforestation or pollution harm its productivity. When degradation becomes extreme it leads to desertification.

“We are a desert country. We are exposed to the harshest mode of land degradation, which is desertification,” Osama Faqeeha, Saudi Arabia’s deputy environment minister, told AFP.

Saudi Arabia has a target of restoring 40 million hectares, including “several million hectares of land” by the end of the decade, Faqeeha said.

The country has recovered 240,000 hectares of land with methods like prohibiting illegal logging and the expansion of total national parks from less than 20 in 2016 to over 500, according to Faqeeha.

Lands can also be restored through crop rotation, tree planting, the restoration of wetlands and grazing management.

“We found ourselves caught in a vicious cycle that we must break,” Thiaw told the UNCCD conference, as AFP reported. “We can only achieve this if we move beyond the silos that hinder our collective action and if we adopt a holistic approach that recognizes the constant interaction between desertification, biodiversity loss, and the acceleration of climate change.”