COP16 to combat desertification opens in Saudi Arabia

The 16th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) opens Monday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

With the theme of "Our Land. Our Future," the event will last from December 2 to 13, aiming to scale up and speed up land restoration and usher in a new era of global cooperation on drought resilience.

Nearly 200 parties, along with experts and civil society groups, convene to call for urgent actions to combat desertification.

In 1994, the UNCCD was established. The COP 16, which marks the 30th anniversary of the UNCCD, is the largest in the treaty's history and is the first to be held in the Middle East and North Africa region. Delegates are expected to decide on collective actions to accelerate land restoration efforts, enhance resilience to droughts and sand storms, restore soil health and scale up nature-positive food production by 2030 and beyond.

For the first time, COP16 introduces a dual approach with a Negotiation Track and an Action Agenda, both interlinked to achieve bold outcomes in formal negotiations and facilitate the implementation of COP decisions.

Negotiation Track focuses on critical COP decisions and political declarations essential for advancing global land and drought resilience. And Action Agenda highlights voluntary commitments and actions on land, resilience and people across the thematic days during COP16.

The high-level segment at COP16 includes ministerial dialogues on drought resilience, finance and migration.

Desertification is defined by the UNCCD as "land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry subhumid areas caused by various factors, including climatic variations and human activities." This process transforms once-productive land into desert-like landscapes, diminishing biomass productivity and reducing arable land, thereby threatening food security.

The effects are already severe. According to the UNCCD, land provides nearly 95 percent of the world's food, yet up to 40 percent of global land is now degraded, directly affecting 3.2 billion people. Every second, an area equivalent to four football fields of healthy land is lost, totaling 100 million hectares each year.

Additionally, droughts have become more frequent and intense, with a 29 percent increase in their occurrence since 2000. By 2050, three-quarters of the world's population could be affected by drought, the UNCCD warns.

The Sahel region, spanning across Africa south of the Sahara Desert, is one of the most well-known areas affected by desertification. As fertile soil erodes and vegetation vanishes, agricultural productivity plummets and famines severely afflict the area. Overgrazing and deforestation have turned productive land into desert.

Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, the surface area of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan shrunk to less than 10 percent of its original size due to large-scale irrigation projects diverting its inflowing rivers. The exposed seabed has now been transformed into a salty desert, the Aralkum Desert.

"Desertification has reached a critical point in many Arab countries. To fight desertification needs international cooperation," said Ahmed Nazal Nuri, an official from the League of Arab States' environment and climate affairs department, when he was visiting the Maowusu Desert in northwest China.

In Africa, Chinese techniques and expertise are supporting the African Union's initiative known as the Great Green Wall,  which was launched in 2007 to restore degraded land.

In 2015, UNCCD parties were invited to formulate voluntary targets to achieve land degradation neutrality in accordance with their specific national circumstances and development priorities by 2030. To date, 131 countries have committed to setting the targets and more than 100 countries have already set their targets.

China, which hosted COP 13 in 2017 and has been active in desertification control since signing the UNCCD in 1994, will engage in discussions on various agendas. The country is expected to contribute to the development of international policies and promote the use of Chinese technology to monitor and restore land resilience against global land degradation and drought, according to a briefing by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.

(With input from Xinhua)

(Cover: A view of the Al-Ghat National Park in Saudi Arabia, November 28, 2024. /CFP)