By Simon Jessop and Pesha Magid
RIYADH (Reuters) – Restoring the world’s degraded land and keeping its deserts in place will require at least $2.6 trillion in investment by the end of the decade, the U.N. executive director overseeing global talks on the issue told Reuters, quantifying the cost for the first time.
More frequent and severe droughts as a result of climate change combined with the food needs of growing populations meant societies were at greater risk of upheaval if action was not taken, Ibrahim Thiaw said ahead of this week’s talks in Riyadh.
The two-week meeting aims to strengthen the world’s drought resilience, including strengthening legal obligations for countries, setting strategic next steps and securing funding.
Much of the roughly $1 billion a day needed will have to come from the private sector, said Thiaw, who is executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
“Most investments in land restoration in the world come from public money. And that’s not right. Because basically the main driver of land degradation in the world is food production… which is in the hands of the private sector,” Thiaw said, adding that from now on provides only 6% of the money needed for rehabilitation of damaged land.
“How is it that one hand degrades the land and the other hand is tasked with restoring and repairing it?” Thiaw said, acknowledging the responsibility of governments to set and enforce good land use policies and regulations.
With a growing population that means the world needs to produce twice as much food on the same amount of land, private sector investment would be crucial, he said.
The talks in Saudi Arabia follow similar UN events in October on biodiversity and in November on climate change and plastics, where finance – or the lack of it – played a central role.
To reach $2.6 trillion – approaching France’s annual economic output – the world needs to close an annual gap of $278 billion, after investing just $66 billion in 2022, the UN said.
A LONG-TERM PROCESS
A UN study released on Sunday said soil degradation is “undermining the Earth’s ability to sustain humanity” and that failure to reverse it would “present a challenge for generations”.
The land, totaling about 15 million square kilometers – larger than Antarctica – is already degraded and increasing by about one million square kilometers every year, it added.
Reaching an agreement to tighten states’ legal obligations, however, will be one of the more difficult agreements to reach, Thiaw said, adding that some countries “are not ready to have another legally binding instrument” while others feel it is important.
Although countries have already pledged to protect about 900 million hectares of land, they should have set a more ambitious target of 1.5 billion hectares and accelerated the pace.
Failure to reach agreement on steps to restore degraded land would ultimately hurt parallel UN-led efforts to curb climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions and protect biodiversity, Thiaw said, with agriculture accounting for 23% of greenhouse gas emissions, 80% deforestation and 70% % use of fresh water.
“The resources we are talking about are not charity,” Thiaw said, adding: “So it is important that we see this not as an investment for poor Africans, but as an investment that will maintain balance in the world.”
