Statements

By UNCCD Executive Secretary Ms. Monique Barbut Are you overwhelmed by the depressing news coming at you daily? Conflict, forced migrants, famine, floods, hurricanes, extinction of species, climate change, threats of war… a seemingly endless list.  It might surprise you, but you can really make a difference on many of these issues. Just like every raindrop counts towards a river and every vote counts in an election, so does every choice you make in what you consume. With every produce you consume, you strengthen the river of sustainability or of unsustainability. It is either a vote in favor of policies that spread social goods like peace and poverty eradication or social bads like – conflict or grinding poverty. We look up to governments a lot, forgetting that governments set up policies to encourage us to make specific choices. That’s how powerful our lifestyles choices are.  Imagine, what would happen if the world’s over seven billion consumers committed, every year, to just one lifestyle change that will support the provision of goods from sustainably managed land.   Every year, we make New Year resolutions about change. Why not include as one of those resolutions, a change of habit leading that will lead to a smart sustainable consumer lifestyle? Without any government intervention, you can make choices that will help to end deforestation, soil erosion and pollution or reduce the effects of drought or sand and dust storms. However, to make the right lifestyle change, each of us must first find out where the goods we consume are cultivated and processed. For instance, if they are linked to conflict in regions with rapidly degrading land or forests or polluted water or soils, then chose an alternative that is produced sustainably. It is a small, but achievable change to make every year.  Every country and product has a land footprint. What we eat. What we wear. What we drink. The manufacturer or supplier of the products we consume. The brands related to these suppliers that we will support. We prioritize buying from the local small farm holders to reduce our global land footprint. Consumers have plenty of options. But a vital missing link is the informed consumer.  Through mobile phone apps**, it is getting easier and easier to track where the goods we consume come from. It is also getting easier to find alternative suppliers of our choice, as the private sector embraces the idea of ethical business. The information you need is literally in the – mobile phone in the – palm of our hand. But you must believe in your own power to change the world. The global effect on the market may surprise you.  We will reward the food producers, natural resource managers and land planners struggling against all odds to keep the land healthy and productive. This is cheapest way to help every family and community in the world to thrive, and avoid the damage and loss of life that comes from environmental degradation and disasters.  Make 17 June, the celebration of the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, your date with nature. It’s the mid-point of the year and a good moment to review the progress you are making towards your New Year resolution of a sustainable lifestyle.  In 2030, when the international community evaluates its achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, you can point to positive changes that you have contributed in favor of present and future generations. You are more powerful than you think. Take your power back and put it into action. Read more: For information on how to track your land footprint, read: Fixing what the land is losing between the farm and your fork Information about World Day to Combat Desertification is here To understand the link between drought and land degradation read: Recurring droughts are clear and present dangers The opinion is available in other UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish About UNCCD The UNCCD is an international agreement on good land stewardship. It helps people, communities and countries to create wealth, grow economies and secure enough food and water and energy, by ensuring land users have an enabling environment for sustainable land management. Through partnerships, the Convention’s 197 Parties set up robust systems to manage drought promptly and effectively. Good land stewardship based on a sound policy and science helps integrate and accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, builds resilience to climate change and prevents biodiversity loss.

This year on World Day to Combat Desertification, we think about the real value of land.  Not just its economic value. Land is worth so much more than that. It defines our way of life and our culture – whether we live in the city or the villages. It purifies the water we drink. It feeds us. It surrounds us with beauty.  But rapid population growth and changing consumption patterns have generated excessive pressure on our finite land resources. This, in turn, has led to land degradation around the world. Globally, thirty percent of all land has lost its true value due to degradation. How can we meet our most basic needs - let alone our wants - when the amount of healthy and productive land is declining so dramatically?  The future looks bleak. Fortunately, with changes in consumer and corporate behavior, and the adoption of more efficient planning and sustainable practices, there can be enough for all. Enough land to provide sufficient food and water for everyone. Enough to deliver the other goods and services we need and want from nature.  Difficult choices and trade-offs will be needed, including a commitment to change long-established consumption patterns. But get the decisions right, and the future looks a lot brighter.  So, I would ask you: when you choose what to eat, what to wear or what to drive, think about how your choice impacts the land – for better or for worse.  We are all decision-makers. In our daily lives, our choices have consequences. And our small decisions can transform the world. Let us try and act accordingly. Nature offers us many opportunities. Let us work together to transform the way we consume, produce, work, and live together without compromising our current or future social, economic or environmental security. Without compromising the land on which it all depends.  The Sustainable Development Goal target of achieving land degradation neutrality by 2030 is an important response to these challenges. And a pathway forward, together.  It will help us conserve and manage the land we have well. It will help us recover degraded lands; stop land grabbing; fight climate change; increase food production and provide clean water.  Support Sustainable Development Goal 15.  Tell us how you plan to achieve the goal of land degradation neutrality.  Our way of life – on land – depends on it.  Learn more: Read the address in other languages: French | Spanish | Arabic | Russian | Chinese Video message from Ms. Monique Barbut (with Spanish subtitles) Celebrate 2018WDCD  

Promoting sustainable land use unifies our voices for bird conservation   Birds are highly sensitive to their environments. With 30 per cent of the land now degraded, the long journeys migratory birds fly every year across continents to find food, breeding and rearing grounds are becoming ever more dangerous and exhausting. As they lose the land resources that usually sustain them, migrating birds are increasingly forced to find new habitats. It is making their journeys longer, more tiresome and their survival and reproduction less secure. In short, land degradation poses an existential threat to migratory birds.  The commitment countries made in 2015 under Sustainable Development Goal 15 to achieve land degradation neutrality (LDN) by 2030, is a commitment that guarantees the future survival of migratory birds. By choosing land degradation neutrality, the countries agreed to avoid degrading any new land, to reduce the degradation of the lands currently in use and to reverse the process in the degraded areas.  To date, 116 countries that are Party to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification are setting in place the measures needed to avoid, reduce and reverse land degradation by 2030. Over half of these countries now have concrete targets to assess their progress towards meeting the LDN target. Of the latter, 40 countries are working on schemes to recover and transform degraded large areas and landscapes into healthy ecosystems - havens for migratory birds and for human wellbeing.  Encouraging land users all over the world to adopt sustainable land use and management practices is to unify our voices for bird conservation. Each commitment to land degradation neutrality is a vote to secure the feeding, breeding and rearing grounds for migratory birds. Read more: World Migratory Bird Day Land degradation neutrality  LDN targets Sustainable land management World Day to Combat Desertification

The new UNCCD weblog is designed for scientists, experts, practitioners, policy-makers and journalists to share their insights, expertise and ideas with other UNCCD stakeholders. It is also a means for the UNCCD to reach out to the general public and promote specific issues of interest in an understandable way. Publication of the content does not necessarily mean an endorsement of the piece but rather a facilitation of an exchange of diverse and critical perspectives that promote learning. > Read more

Ordos, 6 September 2017 Time for the Butterfly to Flap its Wings Friends, Focal Points,  Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,  Welcome to Ordos.  Allow me to extend my sincere thanks to the Govt. of the People’s Republic of China for their warm and efficient welcome.   When in China and when you want to urge wisdom, quoting Confucius is a good place to start.  Confucius once said “Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change”. As most of us are neither the wisest or stupidest of people, we are – we must – learn to embrace change.  I fully recognize, for UNCCD Parties, the last few years have been all about change.  We have made a lot of progress. I would suggest, it has been something of a metamorphosis.   A complete change in form: caterpillar, to pupa – safe in its chrysalis - to butterfly. The same genetics but a very different beast.  Historically, despite the importance of the issue [the egg], UNCCD made slow progress. We got caught up in affected and non-affected and a process that prioritized perfect agreement rather than tangible progress. We were perhaps content to advance at the pace of a caterpillar.   But do you know…when the caterpillar becomes a pupa – and retreats inside its chrysalis/UN cocoon – it starts to digest itself?  If you were to cut open a chrysalis [at just the right time], a sort of protein rich caterpillar soup would ooze out.  And it is not entirely a soupy mess. Groups of cells survive and use the protein-rich soup to form the adult butterfly. The transformation is complete.  So it may have felt like UNCCD spent a little too much time wading through a soupy mess.  But it is time well invested: a new strategy framework has been born. A framework I trust will be endorsed at COP13.  It gives us a new sense of purpose and common cause.  With land degradation neutrality as an organizing principle embedded within the strategy and as Convention is recognized as the custodian of this target, we have an important accelerator target for the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Change agreement.   The indicators developed by UNCCD Parties on land cover, land productivity and organic carbon will be used to measure progress at global level. This global push has allowed us to begin forging partnerships on issues such as remote sensing and satellite data.  With a clear target and with the data to back it up, we have been able to get much better organized.   This data is allowing, currently, 110 countries to set voluntary national LDN targets to drive their national action plans.  This is a massive undertaking involving 11 donors and thousands of colleagues across Ministries and departments worldwide.  So at this COP we can already learn how that exercise is progressing, where the gaps and the hotspots are.  But change is definitely gathering pace. COP 21 endorsed the importance of land in carbon sequestration and the IPCC planning to release in 2019 a special report on the role of land in tackling climate change.  At the same time, we see a new climate narrative emerging that explicitly recognizes the need to address the resilience challenges of communities in the face of water scarcity and drought in particular.   This year, once again, we have been rightly outraged by needless losses, instability, famine and death in drought afflicted areas of Africa and South America.  I commend Parties that have taken vigorous actions for their leadership.  On biodiversity, we saw short term action plans for ecosystem restoration emerging out of the Cancun COP.  Parties to the Biodiversity Convention are aligning on our indicators for Aichi Target 15.  While the UN Forest Framework new strategy also endorses the LDN approach.  The move of the GM to Bonn is a clear success.  A strong, complementary corporate identity has emerged with clarity on who does what - that does away with unnecessary duplication.  The new Deputy Executive Secretary – Mr. Pradeep Monga – has taken up the mantle of enhancing our internal systems. We improve and simplify our administration to provide a better cost / benefit to your financial contributions. So, from what may have seemed like a soupy mess a few short years ago, something rather wonderful is emerging.   Land, like the butterfly, is emerging as the critical component in a number of politically relevant, high profile issues.  There is political will to address land issues and the secretariat and the GM are increasingly able to act effectively.  The stars are aligned.   But, I fear, this is a limited window of opportunity.  And there are huge expectations for what we can achieve by 2030.   So at this COP and in the near future, we need to focus on IMPLEMENTATION.  Implementation means:  1) Turning your LDN targets into action.  It would be intolerable for me that we have invested so much time and effort into getting to this point and you, dear Parties, did not see the real benefit. Much of the work needs to continue to be done by your own governments, of course.  But there are important external developments, particularly financial ones.  At COP13, you will hear about the launch of the LDN Fund.  This is the first time that there is a fund dedicated to rehabilitating degraded land.  I am more delighted that it will be managed by the private sector. In that, I thank the Mirova-Nataxis group for their outstanding work in shepherding the establishment of the Fund.   You will also here other truly great commitments to LDN implementation from a number of Parties.  So while an increasing amount of public and private financial resources is expected, the missing piece is now a pipeline of technically sound projects – drawn from your LDN targets - delivering on the sustainability triple bottom line.  So, moving beyond just cooperation at inter-secretariat level we are working with the UNFCCC and CBD, to elaborate together the Rio Conventions Project Preparation Facility to assist in the development of investment-ready projects at the scale needed to create economic and social benefits while addressing pressing land, climate, and biodiversity challenges. 2) But we also need to take decisions on issues that we have not yet dealt with. I think in particular about what should be the positive agenda to address droughts or sand dust storms. Gender and land tenure security are also of special importance.  We would all like to see the transformative projects you are developing become more gender sensitive and responsive to the heavy daily workload of rural women.   3) On all these issues, Knowledge/Strategic Communication: To support you further, we need to focus on our knowledge base.  We will work with the SPI to support the IPCC and IPBES special reports that are due to be released in the coming months.  I hope you will also find the Global Land Outlook a useful strategic communications product.  Partnerships I think you can see, I am optimistic and enthusiastic.  We are at a unique moment.  To my mind, it is absolutely the time for UNCCD to emerge from the shadows.  To emerge like a butterfly from the chrysalis.  To do this, we will rely on your insight. We will draw on not a little ancient Chinese wisdom.  And will hope for bold, forward looking decisions.   Thank you.

This Earth Day, we invite you to take your children outside, into nature, to strengthen their connection with the environment. It is the best way to motivate them to protect it. The effects of climate change are not always obvious to us. Yet, they are undeniable. It is easier to see the harmful effects in parts of the world with very different geography from Canada: the arid lands, where three billion people live. En Français: En ce Jour de la Terre, nous vous invitons à profiter de la nature avec vos enfants pour qu'ils bâtissent un lien avec leur environnement. C'est la meilleure façon de les motiver à le protéger. Même si les effets des changements climatiques ne nous sautent pas toujours aux yeux, ils sont indéniables. Les dommages se voient davantage dans un environnement loin des réalités du Canada: les terres arides, où vivent trois milliards de personnes.

The effects of the El Nino drought of 2015-2016 are barely over and we have a new emergency. More than 20 million people in northern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen are currently at risk of starvation. It could become the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of United Nations in 1945.

International Women’s Day this year focuses on economic empowerment in the changing world of work. The vision is to achieve gender equality and empowerment of women and girls by 2030. Girls’ aged three will become adults with a legal right to work in 2030. Together, with those aged up to 10, these girls are the prime target for gender equality by 2030.   

As high-level political representatives gather in Addis Ababa this week for the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, there are reasons to be optimistic about the fight against climate change and the pursuit of sustainable development. Investments in renewable energies have topped $270 billion a year, and clean sources of power, like the sun and the wind, represent a rising share of the world’s energy production. Meanwhile, sectors such as transportation, urban planning, and construction are undergoing root-and-branch change in terms of energy efficiency and conservation.

Women are not only the world’s primary food producers. They are hardworking and innovative and, they invest far more of their earnings in their families than men. But most lack the single most important asset for accessing investment resources – land rights.