* By Yunus Arikan, Director of Global Advocacy, ICLEI World Secretariat, and Anton Earle, Global Coordinator Water Systems, ICLEI Africa.
As one of the three Rio Conventions of the legacy of 1992 Earth Summit, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) convened its sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) on 2-13 December 2024 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Under the theme “Our Land. Our Future”, UNCCD COP16 addressed efforts on desertification, land degradation, and drought, in particular highlighting the critical role of land restoration as an opportunity to respond to global sustainability challenges.
The expectations for UNCCD COP16 were high, with the UNCCD Secretariat boldly proclaiming that “it represents a moonshot moment to raise global ambition and accelerate action on land and drought resilience through a people-centered approach”. The use of the term moonshot refers to a project or venture that is intended to have deep-reaching or outstanding results after one heavy, consistent, and usually quick push.
There has indeed been a heavy and consistent push to ensure that the impacts of desertification, drought and land degradation are taken seriously by the global community and not just viewed as an issue for countries in arid zones. It was certainly not a quick push with this 30th anniversary year of the Convention seeing over 23,000 participants and a strong recognition that all regions in the world are at risk of being impacted by degraded landscapes with droughts as well as floods a global reality.
COP16 in 2024 in Riyadh was definitely marked as a turning point for the UNCCD community, as the largest-ever gathering since the COP1 1997. While the UNCCD COP16 resulted with a number of outcomes such as the introduction of an Action Agenda including Business4Land initiative, acknowledging Indigenous People and Local Communities as specific constituencies in addition to Civil Society Organizations,elevated financial and institutional commitments especially from the global South including the Arab World and expanding the land degradation to pastoral lands and agriculture, it feel short of the expectations to introduce more binding commitments on drought and land.
Local governments are the frontline responders to these impacts and there is increasing recognition that they need financial as well as technical support in shifting from a reactive to a proactive approach in ensuring resilience for the populations they represent. Thus, the positive momentum through COP16 also provided suitable conditions to elevate the engagement of local and regional governments in the UNCCD agenda. Through the UNCCD COP16 Mayors Forum on 6th December, preceded with a High Level Dialogue, convened by ICLEI as the focal point on behalf of the Global Task Force, and facilitated by UCLG, in collaboration with the UNCCD Secretariat and UNHabitat, COP16 was recognized as the largest and the most effective mobilization of Mayors and other subnational leaders in the 30 years history of the UNCCD.
Building on the engagement since COP1, but especially intensified since 2014 with ICLEI 2017 Briefing Paper on Land Degradation and Cities,as well as the first UNCCD Local and Regional Governments Day at COP14 , and Decisión 22 at COP15 in 2022 linking land degradation to migration and food security, UNCCD COP16 Mayors Forum marked a significant breakthrough that has the potential to replicate the success of local and subnational engagement in other 2 Rio Conventions, on climate under the UNFCCC and biodiversity under the CBD.
At UNCCD COP16 Mayors Forum, Mayors and other subnational leaders around the world, including Mohamed Sefiani, Mayor of Chefchaouen, Morocco and representing ICLEI in his capacity as ICLEI Vice President, presented actionable solutions on sustainable land and water management, including how communities are being impacted by land degradation and water security challenges (encountering both droughts as well as floods due to the rapid runoff from impermeable soils). There was a specific acknowledgement of the urban-rural linkages that need to be strengthened if sustainable resources and services are to be supplied and degraded ecosystems recovered. A key theme emerging from CoP16 is how interwoven the three Rio conventions are, including water forming the blue thread linking them as Water resilience in the face of a changed climate is dependent on landscape restoration, soil conservation, and healthy biodiverse ecosystems, as well as the discussions around loss-and-damage. In addition to the UNCCD COP16 Mayors Forum, ICLEI experts also provided active contributions to numerous side events, such as on water management by Global Water Operators Alliance (GWOPA) where ICLEI as member of the Steering Committee, or on integrating urban landscapes into 3 Rio Conventions, hosted by UN Economic Commission for Europe and FAO.
UNCCD COP16 Mayors Forum concluded with a collective Declaration and Call for Engagement, including a commitment to convene an annual dialogue on the implementation of climate-land-nature actions under 3 Rio Conventions at local and subnational level during the annual Daring Cities Forum, hosted by ICLEI and City of Bonn in Bonn, Germany in tandem to mid-year UN climate negotiations. The decision strengthens ICLEI’s efforts to position multilevel action and sustainable urbanization as unique opportunities to solve global sustainability challenges, pursuant to ICLEI’s role as the focal point of the Global Task Force at the 3 Rio Conventions and related process. As the next UNCCD COP17 will be convened in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2026, Daring Cities Forum in June 2025 will play a critical role in reflecting outcomes of UNCCD COP16 into new multilevel, integrated, holistic national climate plans to be submitted by UNFCCC COP30 in Belém in November 2025.
