Protecting our ‘most vital infrastructure’: Pushing back on desertification
Land Degradation: The Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
Qinilo.com – While headlines chase intensifying heatwaves, urban wildfires, and coastal inundation, a quieter catastrophe is consuming the ground beneath billions of people. Across the planet, roughly 40 per cent of all land now suffers from degradation and drought, putting the daily survival of an estimated 3.2 billion individuals at risk.
The economic toll is staggering. Degradation and drought together drain close to $900 billion from the global economy annually. Drought alone — which has surged by nearly one-third since the year 2000 — accounts for approximately $300 billion in yearly losses.
Rangelands Under Siege
Among the most vulnerable ecosystems are rangelands: sprawling natural territories ill-suited to crop cultivation yet indispensable to global food systems. Nearly 70 per cent of the world’s livestock feed originates from these lands, and two billion people depend on them for sustenance. Despite their critical role, rangelands absorb the sharpest impacts of degradation and drought while receiving comparatively little public attention.
Mongolia: A Nation Feeling the Blow
Nowhere is the threat more visceral than in Mongolia, a vast land-locked country hemmed between Russia and China and dominated by the Gobi Desert and semi-arid grassland. Approximately one-third of its population depends on pastoralism, yet nearly 77 per cent of the nation’s territory is already degraded.
In the back-to-back years of 2023 and 2024, Mongolian herders lost more than seven million head of livestock when brutal summer droughts gave way to extreme cold dzud winters.
“For Mongolia, land is inseparable from our people, our livelihoods and our future. We know that the health of our land has direct consequences for people’s lives,” highlighted Mongolia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Battsetseg Batmunkh as the conference opened.
COP17: From Rhetoric to Results
The two-week COP17 conference, hosted in Ulaanbaatar, launched Monday. Building on momentum generated at COP16 in Riyadh, delegates are tasked with strengthening drought resilience, advancing sustainable agriculture, and safeguarding soils through early-warning systems, vulnerability assessments, and deeper international cooperation.
“The greatest change we want to see from COP17 is a shift from talk to action, from targets to implementation, and from commitments to measurable results,” stressed Mongolia’s Prime Minister Nyam-Osoryn Uchral.
UN Executive Secretary Yasmine Fouad framed the stakes ahead of the summit:
“Land is our most vital infrastructure — underpinning food security, water, livelihoods and stability.”
She added that these challenges are no longer abstract environmental worries:
“They are already affecting the food we produce, the water we depend on, the resilience of our economies and the ability of communities to build secure futures.”
Closing the $278 Billion Gap
A central COP17 priority is drawing private-sector capital into land restoration and drought resilience. The numbers underscore the urgency: an estimated $355 billion is required each year to restore degraded land and build resilience, yet current investment reaches only $77 billion — leaving a finance gap of roughly $278 billion.
Public coffers alone cannot bridge that shortfall. Despite the sector’s heavy reliance on dependable land and water supplies, private actors contribute merely around six per cent of global land-restoration and drought-resilience funding.
Organisers are therefore pushing initiatives such as the Business4Land Forum to forge tighter collaboration among governments, development banks, corporations, and investors.
“I am confident that COP17 will mark an important step towards stronger international cooperation and accelerated global action,” said Mongolia’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, and Chair at COP17, Sandag-Ochir Tsend.
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