At COP 28, Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar spoke with Ibrahim Thiaw, head of UNCCD, on the reality of adaptation, what's working, and what we can expect from the UNCCD COP in Riyadh.
What are the main themes you're focused on as you look at land use restoration and how to protect the dwindling land that exists in the world today?

Essentially how we as humans have interacted with land and the kinds of relationships we have developed with land. We have been extracting resources from land, it's like an extractive industry. And we have come to realize that these are not infinite resources, they need to be managed. So it is about time for humanity now to consider land as natural capital that needs to be managed, and we should review the way we interact with land. Our lifestyle is simply not compatible with the capacity of Earth to regenerate itself. We are also dealing with drought. Droughts are a natural phenomenon that have been there for millennia, but they have increased over time, they are more frequent and more severe. So we are dealing also with the phenomenon of drought.

And drought is an interesting thing, where countries are experiencing years of drought, and then sudden flooding, right? It's either too little water or too much water. Tell us about that dynamic.

Droughts and floods are usually twins, they follow each other. The drier the land is, the less ability it has to absorb water when it rains; therefore, the runoff is extremely high, but also the drier the ecosystems affected and the capacity of the ecosystem to retain water is also lower, so you also have landslides.

So what do you want to see happen on the adaptation side? Obviously, there's a lot of discussion at COP around mitigation, and certainly if we can lower the trajectory of carbon emissions that will help. But given where we're headed, what do you want to see in terms of land use that we can change? And particularly I’m thinking about the institutions that fund global development efforts, the U.N. agencies that implement and fund, or the multilateral development banks or the bilateral agencies. What do you want to see them do differently?

The main driver of emissions in the world today is our food systems. Therefore, we need to redefine the way we produce food, and the way we consume it, and the way we transport it, and the way we discard or waste it. When you come to a climate COP, of course, the discussion is about climate.

You see a farmer from around the world, you ask them whether they spend their day, morning doing climate, midday doing biodiversity, and afternoon doing climate. Of course not. They have one day, they have one family to feed, they have one opportunity to meet. And they actually do whatever they can to produce the food to live. So U.N. agencies, multilateral banks, and international organizations can actually adapt themselves. And when we say adapt, it doesn't mean only adapting what they are doing but the way they're funding and the way they are interacting with countries that are severely hit by droughts, by floods, by climate change affected by profound transformation of the economy and the way their communities, especially rural communities, are affected by all this. READ further from the source