This week, leaders gathering in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for COP17 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will have an opportunity to change that. What happens on Mongolia’s vast rangelands—and in degraded landscapes around the world—matters far beyond the environment. It is increasingly central to food and water security, supply chains and economic stability. In other words, the soil beneath our feet is essential to protecting livelihoods and economies from growing shocks.
The COVID pandemic exposed how vulnerable global supply chains can be. Recent wildfires and droughts have exposed another weakness: the deteriorating natural systems on which those supply chains depend. Healthy land is not simply an environmental asset. It is economic infrastructure.
The UNCCD estimates the combined cost of land degradation, drought, and desertification to the global economy at $878 billion annually. Governments routinely spend billions responding to and rebuilding after floods, wildfires, droughts, and other disasters—with US Government spending on wildfire suppression only set to grow—yet they invest only a fraction in preventing the degradation that makes economies and communities more vulnerable to these shocks. From an economic perspective, this is a poor allocation of capital.
In fact, roughly $44 trillion of global GDP, around half of global output, is moderately to highly dependent on natural capital, including healthy land. Restoring degraded land should therefore be viewed as an investment in economic resilience. An added benefit is that responsible management and restoration of degraded agricultural land can help reduce emissions, including agricultural methane through improved livestock health and feed quality.
This is the context in which COP17 opens in Ulaanbaatar, and rangelands are top of the agenda. They make up more than half of the earth’s land surface, and 70% of host country Mongolia’s territory. They provide 16% of global food supply, 70% of livestock feed, and support the livelihoods of up to 500 million pastoralists—land stewards who sustain the adaptive knowledge and land management practices on which food systems depend.
A global consultation led by the WBCSD and mandated by the UNCCD Secretariat has called for governments to create a coherent and stable policy environment, develop a long-term investment vision, and strengthen trusted accountability frameworks. These would give businesses greater confidence to invest in shared socioeconomic objectives.
The next step is to make this investment progress more coordinated and measurable. At COP17, the RAA will launch the Land & Soil Breakthroughs: time-bound, measurable milestones designed to aggregate non-state actor commitments, reduce overlap, and make collective progress visible and investable. The RAA will also launch a Community Platform to visualise progress towards conserving and restoring 1.5 billion hectares of degraded land by 2030.
For too long, healthy land has been treated as an environmental concern rather than the economic asset it is. At a time when governments are under pressure to strengthen economic resilience while managing constrained public finances, and businesses are facing increasing climate shocks, these are the investments we need.
COP17 is an opportunity to change the narrative on land. The question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in its restoration, but whether we can afford not to.
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