By Riccardo Magini
Climate change is often discussed through global temperature pathways, emissions trajectories and finance targets. However, for many communities, it is already being felt through the land: soils that retain less water, rangelands that take longer to recover after drought, falling agricultural productivity and food systems exposed to more frequent heat and rainfall extremes.
Up to 40 per cent of the world’s land is degraded, affecting 3.2 billion people (UN, 2022). More than 100 million hectares of productive land are lost each year, and the economic cost of land degradation, desertification and drought is estimated at USD 878 billion annually (UNCCD, 2024).
Those pressures were at the centre of UNCCD COP17, held in Ulaanbaatar from 17 to 28 August under the theme “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope.” Delegates from nearly 200 countries discussed land restoration, drought resilience and rangelands, with finance and implementation high on the agenda. COP17 cemented a most important point that climate-finance practitioners should take seriously: land degradation and drought are not niche environmental concerns. They are adaptation, food-security, water-security and economic-resilience risks.
A finance push for restoration and rangelands
The most notable thing about COP17 was how much of the agenda turned into actual funding commitments. Governments, development banks, funds and companies announced a USD 1.3 billion portfolio of land-restoration and drought-resilience finance across 23 countries. Spanning five continents, this allocation includes USD 644.5 million in new funding, of which USD 216.4 million is confirmed and progressing toward implementation.
Rangelands were particularly prominent. The new Rangelands Flagship Initiative brings together USD 1.2 billion across 45 projects, reflecting their importance to livelihoods, food systems and climate resilience. What justifies this focus is that rangelands cover around 54 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and support roughly two billion people, including about 500 million pastoralists. When these systems degrade, livestock productivity falls, household incomes shrink and food prices rise. Water availability tightens too, often pushing migration in already fragile regions.
Moreover, on Finance Day, the Global EbA Fund announced up to USD 7.5 million in new grant funding. Two Calls for Proposals aim to accelerate innovative, scalable, and investable Nature-based Solutions that strengthen climate resilience and advance ecosystem restoration.
COP17 also marked the first meetings of the UNCCD Indigenous Peoples Caucus and Local Communities Caucus. The Caucus was agreed at COP16 but was not yet operational after procedural objections kept their terms of reference from formal adoption. The matter has now been carried over to COP18. This is important because restoration ultimately happens in landscapes managed by people. Tenure, local governance, knowledge, incentives and access to finance are not secondary social considerations. They are part of whether restoration works.
Land should be treated as resilience infrastructure
The adaptation case follows directly. Healthy landscapes can retain water, reduce erosion, buffer drought impacts, protect agricultural productivity and support ecosystem services on which settlements and infrastructure depend. In that sense, land restoration is both a conservation activity and a part of the resilience infrastructure of an economy.
Policy and finance are still often organised in silos. A watershed-restoration programme may sit with an environment ministry, drought planning with agriculture or water authorities, adaptation with a climate unit, and public investment with a finance or planning ministry. The underlying risks, however, are shared. The same investment can strengthen water security, reduce climate vulnerability, support rural livelihoods and protect productive assets.
Countries implementing National Adaptation Plans, land degradation neutrality targets or wider development strategies do not need a new financing track for this. What is needed is to connect the agendas that already exist.
The financing problem is bigger than the finance gap
UNCCD estimates that between 2025 and 2030, about USD 355 billion a year is needed to meet land restoration targets and tackle degradation, desertification and drought. Only about USD 77 billion is currently invested each year, leaving a gap of roughly USD 278 billion.
But looking at the problem only as a finance gap can be misleading. Money does not move just because we have calculated how much is needed. Between a national target and a funded project lies a long chain of decisions on policy alignment, institutional roles, project design and risk allocation, among others. If any link in that chain breaks, the money does not reach the projects that need it, and the underlying problems of land degradation, drought and climate vulnerability remain.
COP17’s launch of the Drought Resilience Investment Facility (DRIF), the first global catalytic financing platform dedicated to drought resilience developed jointly with Luxembourg, puts a dedicated financing mechanism behind that need. The facility aims to mobilise up to USD 400 million in public and private capital for water security, sustainable agriculture, nature-based solutions and land restoration. Its real value lies less in that amount than in what it represents. It is a shift away from treating drought solely as an emergency to respond to, and creates a way to finance drought resilience before a crisis strikes.
The financing response, however, moved faster than the negotiations on a global drought framework. Countries had spent two years examining and negotiating options for a stronger international drought regime intended to shift drought management from crisis response towards prevention. Yet COP17 could not reach consensus, including on whether the framework should be binding or voluntary. Drought will now remain a standalone item on the UNCCD agenda, with negotiations continuing at COP18 in Egypt.
What would financing land and drought resilience differently look like?
When ideating a solution to the finance gap for land and drought resilience, first, there is a need to integrate rather than silo. Land degradation and drought risk belong in adaptation planning, agricultural policy and public investment decisions, not filed away under environmental strategy alone. That is what allows a country to see when one investment can pay off across several of those areas at once.
Second, build programmes rather than isolated projects. Restoration work is often small and scattered, which makes it hard to finance project by project. A programme can pull that work together across a landscape or a value chain, so it reaches scale without losing the local context that made it work in the first place.
Third, use public finance strategically. Grants and concessional finance still matter most when the benefits are public, the revenue is uncertain, or the community involved cannot absorb the risk. Public funding is usually what pays for the groundwork such as project preparation, data and institutional capacity, and that groundwork is often what makes a project financeable at all. Private capital can build on that, but it cannot do that initial job itself.
Finally, design with the people who manage the land. Representation matters, but durability depends on secure tenure, workable local institutions and incentives that make good management pay off over time. This is the approach E Co. takes into project design where locally-led adaptation is not an add-on but a starting point, built in from the earliest design stages.
Connecting land to the wider climate finance agenda
Climate, biodiversity and land finance have grown through partly separate international processes. Countries, however, experience the risks as one interconnected development challenge. A drought-resilient watershed does not need to belong exclusively to a climate, land or biodiversity finance category. What matters is the resilience outcome, the economics of the intervention and the financing structure that can deliver it.
That is the larger insight from Ulaanbaatar. The next phase after COP18 is not simply about mobilising more money for land. It is about making land, drought and food-system resilience visible in the decisions that determine how climate and development finance is planned and deployed.
If restoring land is ultimately about restoring resilience, success after COP17 will be measured less by the commitments announced in Ulaanbaatar than by how many of those priorities become credible programmes that can attract finance, be implemented at scale and protect the landscapes, economies and people that depend on them.
