Join the GEF at UNCCD COP16

Dramatic desert cliffs at Edge of the World, near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP16) will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from December 2-13, 2024.

For the first time, the COP will include an Action Agenda, with voluntary commitments and actions and thematic days.

A schedule of key events featuring the participation of GEF representatives can be found on our event page

Main Issue

Land is a complex mixture of soil, water, and biodiversity. Working together, these three elements create goods and services that provide a foundation for sustainable livelihoods and peaceful co-existence between peoples. Yet land degradation is putting the health, livelihoods, and security of an estimated 3.2 billion people at risk.

Pressure on global land resources is increasing due to agriculture and land use change. The dominant drivers for land degradation worldwide include unsustainable management or over-exploitation of resources, natural vegetation clearance, nutrient depletion, overgrazing, inappropriate irrigation, excessive use of agrochemicals, urban sprawl, pollution, mining and quarrying, and many others.

The problems are particularly severe in the driest parts of the world. Dryland landscapes cover approximately 40 percent of the world’s land area and support two billion people. The vast majority of people who depend on drylands live in developing countries, where women and children are most vulnerable to the impacts of land degradation and drought.

What We Do - The GEF-8 Approach

As a financial mechanism for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the GEF is well-placed to help countries in fulfilling their commitments under the convention. GEF-8 funding for the land degradation focal area addresses the drivers of land degradation through several Integrated Programs (IPs), multi-focal area and stand-alone projects, as well as through enabling activities, capacity building, and exchange of experience and existing knowledge.

The GEF’s land degradation focal area funds are directed towards the goal of avoiding, reducing, and reversing land degradation, desertification, and mitigating the effects of drought with four objectives:

  1. Avoid and reduce land degradation through sustainable land management (SLM).
  2. Reverse land degradation through landscape restoration.
  3. Address desertification, land degradation, and drought issues, particularly in drylands.
  4. Improve the enabling policy and instrumental framework for land degradation neutrality (LDN).

Integrated Programming in GEF-8 to Maximize Global Environmental Benefits in the Land Degradation Focal Area

IPs form a major component of the GEF-8 delivery towards SLM, land restoration, addressing desertification, land degradation, and drought issues, and in improving the enabling policy and institutional framework for LDN. For example, the Food Systems IP’s transformational approach is reducing environmental degradation and negative externalities in food production systems and across supply chains. The Amazon, Congo, and Critical Forest Biomes IP is increasing and strengthening the protection and governance of intact forest landscapes, tackling the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation at the jurisdictional or landscape level. The Ecosystem Restoration IP is designed to generate multiple environmental and social benefits by applying integrated approaches for restoration of degraded ecosystems.

UNCCD Enabling Activities

The GEF also provides financing for UNCCD enabling activities to support countries to fulfill obligations to the convention, focusing on reporting and formulation of national strategies and plans in line with current and upcoming COP decisions and the UNCCD strategy.

Enabling activities are financed out of global set-asides on top of the GEF’s STAR allocation. In GEF-8, eligible countries can apply for support of up to $120,000 including GEF agency fees. The funding can be made available up to two years in advance of the 2026 reporting deadlines to allow for sufficient time to collect and analyze the necessary data for parties’ reporting to the UNCCD. See this announcement for more details.

Parties’ applications simply require a letter of endorsement of the GEF Operational Focal Point of the country. The funding disbursement will be handled by a GEF partner agency. For further information about the application process, please contact: uapel@thegef.org.

Results

Cumulative results of GEF land degradation projects and programs since 2014 show that 19.7 million hectares of land and ecosystems are under restoration and 74.8 million hectares are brought under SLM in production systems (Sub-indicator 4.3). During this period, 101.4 million people have benefited from restored ecosystems and SLM, of whom 49.6 million are women.

Since 2014, GEF-funded Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Uses (AFOLU) sector projects have reduced 510 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Data as of April 2024.

Main Issue

Desertification and drought put livelihoods and entire ecosystems at risk and, in extreme cases, cause famine, displacement, and conflict. Every year, 12 million hectares of land become unproductive due to desertification and drought, and the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in some 100 countries are threatened by desertification. Drought is one of the major drivers of global food and water insecurity, affecting agricultural production and access to food and water. Drought can, in extreme cases, force people to abandon their land, resorting to migration as a last livelihood strategy. 

Dryland areas are particularly vulnerable to desertification, land degradation, and drought events. They make up 41 percent of the Earth’s surface, with populations in drylands projected to increase by 43 percent—from 2.7 billion in 2010 to 4.0 billion in 2050. Drylands face governance challenges such as low human resource capacity (e.g., low education attainment), low investment of public resources, weak penetration of government services, and insecure land tenure and resource rights for people in vulnerable situations such as women, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and youth.

Climate change exacerbates desertification processes and drought and leads to variations in yields and income from agriculture, threatening the resilience of agro-ecosystems and stability of food production systems. In addition to meteorological causes, drought is aggravated by unsustainable land management, particularly degradation of the vegetative cover and soil.

Making people and productive landscapes resilient to drought is a core mandate of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which is fully supported by the Global Environment Facility through its strategy, and relevant programs and projects.

What We Do - The GEF-8 Approach

Investments on drought mitigation and adaptation are funded by three trust funds: the GEF Trust Fund, the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF), as well as multi-trust fund combinations of the three funds. The highest focal area contributions come from climate change, followed by land degradation, international waters, and biodiversity, making the portfolio truly integrated.

Programs and projects related to drought are characterized by integrated approaches towards proactive drought management, addressing all three pillars:

  • Monitoring and Early Warning
  • Vulnerability and Impact Assessment
  • Drought Mitigation, Preparedness, and Response.

A frequent intervention applied in GEF projects is drought-smart land management, which improves the capacity of soil to accept, retain, release, and transmit water and increase plant water use efficiency. This type of land management increases the water supply where it is needed by living organisms (e.g., crop root systems) or by reducing water demand through drought-resistant crop varieties.

Results

Since its inception, the GEF has invested about $609 million in GEF project financing in 108 projects and programs related to drought mitigation and adaptation. The portfolio includes 60 different countries from all UNCCD Annexes, as well as regional and global projects/programs, with a significant focus on the Africa region, representing 56 percent of the investment. 

Proactive drought management is a complex issue that needs to be addressed through multi-sectoral and integrated approaches, reflecting meteorological, environmental, socio-economic, and development issues.

GEF investments in proactive drought management show a steady upward trend, peaking in the seventh replenishment cycle (GEF-7) with $176 million, and with GEF-8 investments likely to be higher at the end of its cycle in 2026. Starting in GEF-8 and in response to UNCCD COP decisions, the GEF is supporting the formulation and updating of national drought plans. Countries increasingly utilize their available GEF resources to implement elements of these national plans through projects focusing on drought mitigation and adaptation, such as in Mali, Namibia, Mauritania, and Argentina.

Main Issue

Sustainable land management (SLM) is defined by the UN 1992 Rio Earth Summit as “the use of land resources, including soil, water, animals and plant, for the production of goods to meet changing human needs, while simultaneously ensuring the long-term productive potential.”

For many countries, the challenge of achieving SLM comes down to trade-offs between short-term profitability and long-term sustainability. Those ready to adopt SLM approaches may face economic and institutional barriers or lack knowledge and technology innovations to overcome them. In most developing countries, SLM can open up major opportunities for both the land as a natural resource and the people who depend on it.

The three Rio Conventions have overlapping concerns regarding biodiversity loss, land degradation, and deforestation, including implications for livelihoods and food security. As a result, there is potential for greater synergy among the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Through adoption of SLM, countries can implement the conventions in a comprehensive way that address climate change, introduce renewable energy technologies, and combat deforestation.

What We Do

As financial mechanism of the Rio Conventions, the GEF is the world’s largest source of funding for SLM. The GEF channels most of its investments in SLM through the land degradation focal area. Investment priorities are aligned with the UNCCD objectives, enabling countries to deliver on commitments toward implementation of the convention. We help strengthen national-level processes for SLM such as capacity building, institutional collaboration, knowledge management, and mainstreaming across sectors. On the ground, GEF projects improve livelihoods and economic well-being of local communities, and preserve and restore ecosystems.

The Global Environment Facility's land degradation focal area strategy for the GEF-8 replenishment cycle (2022-2026) aligns with the GEF’s vision to achieve healthy and resilient ecosystems by addressing agro-ecosystems in production landscapes. The goal of the land degradation focal area is to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation, desertification, and mitigate the effects of drought. Sustainable land management is the overarching approach to achieve this goal. GEF projects promote the wider application and scaling of SLM interventions that improve productivity and maintain or improve flow of agro-ecosystem services that underpin food production and livelihoods.

GEF-eligible investments focus on:

  1. Agro-ecological methods and approaches including conservation agriculture, agroforestry, and agro-silvo-pastoral practices.
  2. Improving rangeland management and sustainable pastoralism, regulating livestock grazing pressure through sustainable intensification and rotational grazing systems, increasing diversity of animal and grass species, and managing fire disturbance.
  3. Strengthening community-based natural resource management, including legitimate tenure rights recognition and safeguards.
  4. Integrated watershed management, including wetlands where SLM interventions can improve hydrological functions and services for agro-ecosystem productivity.
  5. Implementing integrated pest management approaches to improve soil fertility and water management.

Results

Many GEF projects worldwide are applying SLM approaches and technologies to improve land management in agricultural production landscapes. These results are collected in the WOCAT Global Database, which is the primary recommended database by the UNCCD for SLM. It provides free access to the documentation of field-tested SLM practices from different locations and offers practitioners the opportunity to share their own practices.

As an example of large-scale sustainable management investments, the Great Green Wall Initiative is establishing a wide belt of SLM schemes to tackle desertification. In so doing, it is helping communities in the sustainable management and use of landscapes including forests and trees, rangelands, and other natural resources.

Main Issue

The international community is working to halt and reverse land degradation, restore degraded ecosystems, and sustainably manage our resources through a commitment to land degradation neutrality (LDN).

The concept of LDN emerged from the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in 2012. LDN responds to an immediate challenge: intensifying the production of food, fuel, and fiber to meet future demand without further degrading our finite land resource base. In other words, LDN envisions a world where human activity has a neutral, or even positive, impact on the land.

In 2015, the 12th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP12) adopted 35 decisions related to desertification, land degradation, and drought. These included how to pursue LDN within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how to align UNCCD goals and the action of Parties with the SDGs. As a follow-up, the UNCCD Secretariat and the Global Mechanism established the LDN Target Setting Program, which has been enshrined in the SDGs as target 15.3 on achieving a land degradation neutral world by 2030.

What We Do

As a financial mechanism for UNCCD, the GEF is supporting land degradation neutrality implementation. Initially, the LDN Target Setting Program provided technical assistance to a voluntary group of more than 60 countries to help mainstream LDN into their National Action Programs and plan recovery of landscapes.

Through its LDN implementation projects, the GEF supports countries to achieve LDN in the short- and medium-term.

More than 120 countries have set voluntary LDN targets as a result of this initiative.

Results

The GEF’s LDN portfolio comprises 67 projects approved between 2016 and 2022 during the GEF-6 and GEF-7 replenishment cycles, implemented in a total of 56 countries covering all regional UNCCD Annexes. The projects are implemented by nine different GEF agencies and are in various stages of implementation ranging from project preparation to mid-term evaluation stage. The total investment in these projects is $320 million in GEF grants and over $2.5 billion in co-financing.

The main lessons emerging from the portfolio – also captured within the 2024 LDN learning report - are the following:

  • LDN is a complex scientific concept that needs to be tailored to national and local realities and adjusted to each country’s context.
  • Numerous challenges and information gaps still exist in setting, updating, revising, and monitoring voluntary LDN targets.
  • LDN guidelines for GEF projects have a positive impact on effective integration of the LDN concept in project design.
  • Governance for LDN is multi-dimensional and needs to take into consideration vertical and horizontal (cross-sectoral) coordination as a first step for better policy coherence; participatory planning processes; potential trade-offs and competing land uses; land tenure security; and accurate monitoring.
  • The LDN framework provides countries with the opportunity to work - and address enhanced policy coherence - across ministries and agencies on multi-sectoral topics related to biodiversity, climate change mitigation, adaptation, drought, agriculture and livestock, and forests through various means including integrated land use planning.
  • Fostering inclusivity through LDN is crucial to ensure sustainability and impact.

Main Issue

Healthy landscapes support a huge variety of land uses — from agriculture and agroforestry to wildlife reserves and ecological corridors to forests and plantations. They provide clean water, food, and materials to build shelter for wildlife and humans alike. And they provide livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people.

Landscape restoration helps to reverse land degradation, combat climate change, and prevent biodiversity loss. It also addresses poverty as it can quickly provide financial reflow, create jobs, and is financially viable in the long run, promoting climate adaptation, food security, and increasing livelihood opportunities.

For all these reasons, landscape restoration has become a priority on the international policy agenda:

  • The UNFCCCBD, and UNCCD have all identified restoration as an important component of reaching their goals.
  • The Bonn Challenge seeks to restore 350 million hectares of the world’s deforested lands by 2030. More than 60 countries or jurisdictions have made pledges to the Bonn Challenge.
  • Initiative 20x20, which will also support the Bonn Challenge, aimed to restore 20 million hectares in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2020, and 50 million hectares by 2030.
  • The Africa Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100), launched at the Global Landscapes Forum in Paris in December 2015, has a target of restoring 100 million hectares across the continent by 2030.
  • Initiatives such as The Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration unite governments, organizations, communities, and individuals with a common goal: restoring the world’s degraded and deforested lands. 
  • The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration aims to halt the degradation of ecosystems and restore them to achieve global goals. The UN Decade from 2021 through 2030 will build a strong global movement to ramp up restoration.

What We Do - The GEF-8 Approach

In GEF-8, the land degradation focal area enables countries to invest in land restoration through project activities aligned with Objective 2 of the Programming Directions:

  1. Restore agro-ecosytem services and avoid the reduction of trees and vegetative cover.
  2. Restore forests, avoid forest loss and degradation, including sustainable forest management (SFM). 

GEF projects invest in activities appropriate to local socio-economic conditions to improve vegetative cover and its functionality, assist natural regeneration of woodlands and planting of community woodlots, help establish shelterbelts, agro-forestry and agro-silvo-pastoral models, and practices to enhance soil and water conservation, erosion control, and ground water recharge. Countries can direct their investments also through the GEF-8 Ecosystem Restoration Integrated Program, which aims to generate multiple environmental and socioeconomic benefits by applying integrated approaches to restore degraded ecosystems. It focuses on restoration of ecosystem types with a high potential to generate multiple benefits, especially in landscapes with high values for biodiversity.

Another GEF supported restoration flagship is the Great Green Wall Initiative. It aims to establish a green belt of productive lands and forests along the edge of the Sahara Desert to battle desertification and soil degradation, while tackling poverty. It focuses on a strip of land of 15 km wide and 7,100 km long from Dakar to Djibouti. The Great Green Wall has the potential of restoring landscapes in 11 participating countries.

Results

The GEF supported about 10 million hectares of degraded land under restoration through sustainable forest management projects and programs with tree planting, natural regeneration, and agroforestry systems in GEF-6 and GEF-7. The GEF-8 target for restoration is an additional 10 million hectares, with the majority of contributions coming from the Integrated Programs.