The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), established in 1994, works with 197 parties worldwide to improve the living conditions of people in drylands by maintaining land and soil productivity to build resilience, mitigate drought and combat desertification and land degradation. It strives to achieve a land-degradation-neutral world consistent with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is the sole international convention that directly links soil and land health to sustainable development, with a focus on vulnerable ecosystems including arid, semi-arid and dry subhumid areas, which are used by mobile peoples including pastoralists. These lands are also known to store more than 2/3 of the world’s below-ground carbon and are rich in biodiversity.
The strategic objectives of the Convention include improving the condition of affected ecosystems; avoiding, minimising and reversing land degradation; promoting sustainable land management; contributing to land degradation neutrality (LDN); improving the living conditions of affected populations; mitigating, adapting to and managing the effects of drought, and generating global environmental benefits that resonate with the goals of the IYRP.
At the 14th session of the Conferences of Parties (COP14) in 2019, a side event was devoted to the question "Monitoring & combating land degradation in pastoral areas – are participatory approaches important?".
Several IYRP partners attending COP15 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in May 2022 organised side events about rangelands & pastoralists and developed comments to strengthen the COP Decisions and Declaration in line with the IYRP themes and key messages (see below). See also the Closing Statement of civil-society organisations, shepherded by Nahid Naghizadeh (MENA RISG), which highlighted the challenges of pastoral mobility and supported the IYRP 2026. WWF launched a global coalition for grasslands, savannahs and rangelands to build political momentum and public & private investments to protect, restore and sustainably manage these landscapes and to ensure they are included in restoration, climate and food security action plans; LDN, climate mitigation and biodiversity protection.
In 2023, the UNCCD Secretariat commissioned a Global Land Outlook (GLO) report on rangelands and pastoralists, coordinated by Pedro M Herrera, an IYRP alliance member who is also in the IYRP Working Group on LDN. UNCCD released the GLO report in May 2024 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It makes frequent reference to the IYRP2026.
Major findings from this GLO report were presented at COP16 in December 2024 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The IYRP alliance held a side event there on 7 December 2024, in addition to a large number of other side events on rangelands and pastoralists. On the occasion of COP16, an opinion piece "We must prioritize rangeland conservation for planetary health and biodiversity" by Igshaan Samuels, co-chair of the IYRP global alliance, was published in Mongabay (see below). The COP16 passed a DECISION ON RANGELANDS AND PASTORALISTS (see below). The report back on the desired actions will be made in 2026 at COP17, hosted by the Government of Mongolia, the country that proposed the IYRP.
