Authors
Victoria Crawford – Director Agriculture & Food, WBCSD
In this triple COP year, attention is focused on how businesses, governments and civil society can accelerate implementation.
The first COP of the year, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) COP17, last August in Ulaanbaatar, demonstrated growing momentum around public-private collaboration, mechanisms to translate global commitments into action, and more integrated approaches to addressing interconnected challenges across land degradation, biodiversity, and climate. Together, these developments highlight three lessons for advancing regenerative landscape action and strengthening collaboration ahead of CBD COP17 and UNFCC COP31, taking place in the coming months in Armenia and Turkey respectively.
Regenerative landscapes are a shared responsibility
Throughout COP17, one message emerged clearly: neither government nor business can drive the transition to regenerative landscapes alone. Governments need private investment to scale action on land degradation, while businesses need enabling policy conditions to manage physical risks, strengthen supply chain resilience, and ensure investments make business sense.
One of the clearest examples from UNCCD COP17 of governments increasingly looking to business for investment was the launch of a new Drought Resilience Investment Facility (DRIF). Designed to unlock USD 400 million in public and private financing, the DRIF demonstrates the type of partnership needed to translate shared ambition into action on the ground.
Recognizing the need for an enabling environment to scale business investment, the UNCCD, through its Business4Land Initiative, mandated WBCSD to conduct a global consultation process to identify key barriers, opportunities and mechanisms to unlock private sector contributions to regenerative landscape action. The resulting business-backed policy agenda provides globally applicable recommendations. At COP17, businesses and governments discussed this policy agenda during a public-private dialogue chaired by the governments of Germany and Cote D’Ivoire and parties “took note of” the private sector recommendations in the Decision text (under Decision 5).
Mechanisms are emerging to translate global policy to national implementation
While global policy processes build momentum and alignment on shared priorities, implementation ultimately occurs at regional, country and subnational levels. Plurilateral alignment can also advance shared data tools and approaches that support progress across these contexts. National or subnational governments can partner with relevant business associations including WBCSD’s Global Network Partners and Landscape Accelerators to co-design solutions to address context-specific barriers. To support such collaborations, the UNCCD secretariat is inviting business councils, government bodies and local initiatives to set up Business4Land hubs, with France, China, and Mongolia launching national hubs and several others in scoping. This type of mission-driven multistakeholder collaboration is essential in accelerating implementation.
Another area of progress was in the data needed to identify priorities and show where investment can deliver the greatest value. The Resilient Agriculture Investment for net-Zero land degradation (RAIZ) accelerator, launched at COP30 by the Brazilian government, and supported by FAO, the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) and the UNCCD G20 Global Land Initiative showcased a new iteration of its mapping tool. This spatial data tool informs government representatives, investors and producers where restoration investment can deliver the best returns for people, nature and the economy, using Brazil and Mongolia as country case studies. In parallel, private sector-focused tools such as the OP2B Regeneration Map highlight where corporate sourcing priorities intersect with landscape initiatives, presenting clear investable opportunities for business.
Integrated solutions are needed for healthy lands
Resilient ecosystems provide the foundation for food security, livelihoods, climate action and nature recovery. Leading examples of regenerative landscape action, from linking environmental performance to more favorable lending conditions for producers to the shared investment plans developed by the Landscape Accelerator Brazil, show that biodiversity loss, climate change and land degradation cannot be addressed in isolation. Businesses and farmers do not separate solutions for land degradation from those for biodiversity loss and climate change; so neither should policy processes.
While cooperation between the Rio Conventions has been a longstanding agenda item, it is only in recent years that discussions on synergies have gained real prominence. COP17 saw a step forward, with the leadership of the 3 Rio Conventions participating in a High-Level Dialogue that launched a COP31 Presidency Process towards a proposed Rio Synergies Group for Action. The proposed Group would aim to integrate existing collaborations, technical expertise and financing opportunities transcending the individual COPs. As we now move to the upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COPs in the very near future, a dedicated effort is crucial to ensure that the outcomes of the UNCCD COP17 are more coherently integrated in the upcoming negotiations, commitments and partnerships.
Call to Action
Together, these three key takeaways should shape the path ahead: accelerating regenerative landscapes will require stronger collaboration between governments and business, practical implementation at country-level, and stronger alignment across policy topics and the Rio Conventions. UNCCD COP17 helped build momentum around these priorities. CBD COP17 and UNFCCC COP31 need to take the baton forward.
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