Statements

Dear friends, We are all living through a difficult period at the moment, so thank you for taking the time to engage in this important event. Fifty years ago today, Americans mobilized the world to demand a new contract with nature. Earth Day was born. The very name of this day, of our planet, tells us a lot about who we are as a species. We are creatures of the earth, the soil, the land. Without healthy and productive land, we could not live. Can you even imagine a planet on which nothing grew? No crops. No grass. No trees. It is unthinkable. And yet we, the people of the earth, do not treat the land with the respect it deserves. As humanity grows larger and wealthier, agriculture, urban spaces and infrastructure are eating into the land. Almost three quarters of all land has been transformed from its natural state, and the pace of conversion is accelerating. Two billion hectares of once productive land, an area larger than South America, has been degraded, adversely affecting billions of people. The health and productivity of existing arable land is declining, accelerated by climate change. This has caused many problems and is storing up more for the future. An inability to feed growing populations. Falling biodiversity and shrinking ecosystems, hitting the planet’s ability to provide basic services. Accelerating climate change. Our unhealthy relationship with the land, with nature, is also in part responsible for the COVID-19 crisis.   COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a virus that spilled over from a wild animal to humans. It has wreaked havoc on lives, livelihoods, economies and communities. It signals that our social contract with nature is a global priority now, more than ever before. It tells us that land health, ecosystem health and human health are tied together. Ladies and Gentlemen, Since Earth Day was created, we have put in place many systems and processes to try and arrest the decline of land.   We have the Rio Conventions on biodiversity, desertification and climate change, and its Paris Agreement. We have the Global Goals. These are all milestones to be proud of. If we are being honest, though, we have to say that the world has yet to deliver on the promises made under these agreements. We need to mobilize the world to forge a stronger, healthier and more productive life in harmony with nature for years to come. Today, as part of these efforts, we are going to specifically look at agriculture and climate change. In this regard, let me offer three insights. Insight one   Agriculture is hugely vulnerable to climate change, but it is also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, when fully accounted for, emissions from agriculture are much higher than generally reported. Agricultural emissions are not 23 percent, but 37 percent, of all emissions when you add the pre- and post-production costs. Costs such as refrigeration, food transportation or fertilizer production. Insight two Globalization means that land degradation today is driven, primarily, by poor land uses to provide for distant, not local, consumers; for example, urban or foreign consumers.   This removes the oversight consumers had over their local ecosystems, ensuring they functioned well. This disconnect is aiding agricultural emissions. Insight three Land-based mitigation actions are effective now, not later because this potential falls with every year of delayed action. What’s more, harnessing that potential now brings additional benefits that go beyond mitigation. Enhancing land anywhere enhances health and life everywhere. Ladies and Gentlemen,   Fundamentally, the challenge we face with agriculture is one of land management. We need to produce more food for growing populations while reducing emissions. We need to do so without further expanding and degrading land. To do so, we need to sustainably manage the land. With this in mind, please allow me to lay out four pathways to a meaningful social contract with nature in the context of agriculture, land-use and climate change. The first pathway is treating land as a limiting factor in our development and land-use planning processes.   Much of human development has been built on the idea that the planet is limitless. A field stops producing? Slash and burn the forest to create a new one. Cities getting overcrowded? Expand out into the countryside. Roads are too busy? Widen existing roads or build new ones. We can’t keep doing this. If natural land continues to be converted for agriculture to feed a projected global population of 10 billion, only 10 per cent of natural land will be left by 2050.   Continuing with business as usual will increase land emissions while stripping the land’s capacity to sequester carbon. All development must be based on the idea that land is a limiting factor. This brings us to the second pathway, which is, improving the use of existing land As demand for agricultural land grows, tradeoffs among competing objectives in land grow too. But we must not burn our way to prosperity and damage the land systems we live off.     Instead, let us forge global partnerships that promise a more prosperous future by ensuring we plan and use our land well; doing the right things in the right place at the right scales. For example, planning urban spaces so that they don’t encroach on agricultural land. And by ensuring we only use the land we have already converted. We need to incentivize agricultural techniques that keep land heathy or recover lost productivity – such as conservation agriculture and agroforestry. Sustainable land management techniques keep land productive, produce more with less, and slow land conversion. The third pathway is recovering what has been lost.      We are gearing up for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. I have more good news. The land-degradation neutrality targets nations are setting under the convention I head foresee great restoration plans. The restoration of land is central to healthy agriculture, a cooler planet, restoring biodiversity and re-igniting economic growth at a time of great economic turmoil. Let me explain with an example. The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and Sahel Initiative involves 11 African countries. It’s an 8,000-kilometer long ecosystem innovation along the southern border of the Sahara Desert: from Dakar, Senegal, on Africa’s west coast; to Djibouti by the Red Sea, on the east. This programme is sequestering carbon in the soil – up to 250 million tonnes of carbon – through new vegetation cover and increased organic matter. But it’s doing a whole lot more. It’s improving access to water, food and energy for communities that typically lived off wild plants, trees and animals. Partnerships with ethical supply chains from Europe and the United States are helping poor households to produce, sustainably, goods for local and global consumption. Local governments are creating jobs for the young people that terrorists preyed on. And rural women are owning land.   Inspired by this model, parties to our convention are replicating it widely, in what they often refer to as achieving land degradation neutrality. The fourth pathway is encouraging more responsible consumption and production What we buy, where we buy it and how we use it has a massive impact on the land. One-third of all food produced each year is lost or wasted. This is a footprint of 1.4 billion hectares, close to 30 per cent of the world’s agricultural land area. But it isn’t just food. Food with a large environmental footprint and throwaway fashion are also damaging the land. Changing our diets and shopping behaviours can free up land and lower carbon emissions. Dietary change alone can free up between 80 and 240 million hectares of land. We must change attitudes to consumption and production – as the UNCCD is doing with this year’s Desertification and Drought Day in June, by encouraging people to look at sustainable use of food, feed and fibre. But personal choices will only matter where they are backed by full transparency in the value chain, allowing consumers to make the right choices. Business must step up too. Ladies and gentlemen, Time is running on, so let me conclude with a challenge to young people, who are the torchbearers of sustainable development.   Children, young people and millennials make up 77 percent of the global population. You are the future. But even if this future is one of cities and technology, you are still people of the earth. Without land, you will have nothing. What personal choices will you make for the recovery effort from COVID-19 and for a healthier planet? I urge you, and everyone else, to recommit to what Earth Day is all about and mobilize the world to create a healthier future for all. Thank you! Download the speech

50 years ago people mobilized the world to demand a new social contract with nature. Earth Day was born. Today, our social contract is put in jeopardy. The current COVID-19 crisis is showing how much we depend on each other as well as on other species and nature for our health, food systems and livelihoods. We obtain more than 99.7% of our food from land. For many people and communities in the world, land is the source of livelihoods and the only safety net in the time of crisis. We need to protect nature and continually promote healthy landscapes. And we also need to build back stronger, and smarter, in ways that are healthy, safe, green, just and more resilient. Let us use our strength to fight COVID-19. Let us recommit to what Earth Day is all about. Let us rise again for a new social contract with nature! Happy Earth Day everyone. Read the keynote statement of Ibrahim Thiaw on agricultural and climate change at the Earth Day's 50th anniversary online event.

Today, as we face hard times and new pressures.  A social contract with nature is needed more than ever. 

Mr. Chairman, Distinguished vice-chairs, Dear colleagues and friends, As we gather here today, the world is in crisis. Over the past weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved into a complex emergency, with significant human, health and socio- economic dimensions, at global level. The gravity and scale of the situation calls for an unprecedented level of international action and solidarity. Governments, organizations, communities, and people are stepping up in extraordinary ways. If we don't take care of the pandemic now, we are going to see fallout and secondary effects from this that will have ramifications for a long time, above and beyond the lives that will have been lost. Helping address the COVID-19 crisis is also a priority of our Convention. We all have a role to play. Like all organizations, our Convention faces a fundamental test of our collective strength and will. The role of the CRIC is perhaps today more than ever critical in steering us in the right direction and keeping us moving towards the global common good. Mr. Chairman, I would like to express my deep appreciation for the long-standing support that the CRIC has offered to this Convention. First, allow me to underscore the excellent work you have accomplished at COP 14. Your deliberations and take-aways have guided the work of UNCCD over the past months. It has helped us produce better results for the people we serve. There is now a clear understanding that land restoration is the most cost-effective solution to address the global crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. This was outlined at the Climate Action Summit and at the UNFCCC COP 25. We have continued to boost ambition and accelerate actions for the sustainable use of our land resources, to deliver a land degradation neutral world. We have also been able to make a business case for land restoration through sustainable value chains, calling both on Parties and the private sector to invest and to scale up the impact of individual and collective action. We have invested in the blossoming of a global movement of land restoration, anchored in nature-based solutions. All this, with a renewed commitment to placing people, especially young people and women, at the centre of our efforts. Mr. Chairman, This brings us to my second point, your work schedule. Building on our remarkable achievements, the Secretariat will brief you on the work programme of the CRIC for this biennium. This is a significant reporting round. First, we will take stock of the baselines reported on during the 2017- 2018 reporting process. Second, and for the first time, we will talk about trends and see whether, with the assistance of our monitoring framework, we are going in the right direction. Third, we will introduce a technical review of national reports that were submitted during the last reporting process. Our objective is to support country reporting system and enable our Parties to report credible and robust data. Lastly, you will be briefed on the upcoming intersessional meeting of the CRIC, CRIC 19 with a view to inform COP 15 on a way that better reflects the implementation needs of your process. Mr. Chairman, During this exceptional time, we remain committed to continue delivering our mandate. Rest assured of my and the entire Secretariat’s commitment to continue to provide high quality support to you and to all our Parties. In these trying times, I would also like to thank you for taking on the additional responsibility to work with us to implement the Convention. This is a testimony of your commitment and leadership. Mr. Chairman, This brings me to my third and last point. COVID-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today. We remain convinced that land restoration and sustainable land management are among the best long term responses to the socio-economic crisis facing humanity. The science is clear. Land is the basis for human health, livelihoods, food security, and for our social, economic, cultural and spiritual well-being. The COVID–19 crisis reminds us how much we depend on each other. It also reminds us how much we depend on nature for our health, our food systems and our livelihoods. A healthy and well-functioning land plays a pivotal role in supporting people. For many, this the only safety net there is. In the current context, the pursuit of public health, at all levels from local to global, depends on careful attention to the processes of land degradation, climate change and biodiversity loss. I am confident that soon, the world will restart. This is a chance for our Parties to recover better and come out stronger. Building on our motto – healthy land; healthy people – we must bring the world’s attention to the potential of land to address today’s crises by creating jobs, protecting vulnerable communities and steering the economic recovery towards a more sustainable and inclusive path. Mr. Chairman, We stand at a difficult moment – facing an unprecedented crisis – but it is also an exceptional moment. As leaders are listening and the whole world is watching, we need to continue advocating environmental action to drive transformative change for people; to call for a new social contract with nature. One that allow us to rebuild in ways that are healthy, safe, green, just and more resilient to deliver a land degraded neutral world, the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. Returning to “business as usual” is no longer an option. Your role as CRIC Bureau members is critical in that regard. The dialogue you will start today, must expand, flourish, be enriched by your constituencies, and set the stage for a UNCCD COP 15 that meets the new challenges of the 21st century. I wish you productive discussions over the course of your two-day meeting. My team and I remain at your service. We look forward to receiving your inputs and guidance. Let us pledge to maintain our commitment and our solidarity for the people and for the planet. Thank you. Download the speech.  

La majorité des nouvelles maladies infectieuses humaines sont transmises par des animaux dont nous détruisons l’environnement, explique Ibrahim Thiaw, le secrétaire exécutif de la Convention des Nations unies sur la lutte contre la désertification. 

Great strides have been made in women’s rights around the world. But we are not there yet. To fully realize women’s rights and potential, this generation must stand up and demand tangible equality

For the last decade, bioenergy has been confined to the sidelines of climate-policy debates, owing to the environmental problems associated with its production. But recent innovations have made this option for supplying sustainable, renewable energy not just viable, but necessary.

President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China issued the Beijing Call for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Change on 6 November  2019, in which they express their full support for multilateralism in international environmental governance. The secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification welcomes the Declaration and its call.

Disasters – from droughts and dust storms to hurricanes and floods – are becoming more frequent and more severe as our planet warms. They bring a high cost to human life, economies, and ecosystems. But how we deal with these disasters is not keeping pace.

Two major pieces of research reveal the clear and present danger biodiversity loss and climate change pose to the health, security and well-being of humanity.