One COP ended and another began. After the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, in October, and the Climate Convention in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November, the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, will kick off on Monday, December 2. Hosted by one of the countries most concerned by this issue, UNCCD COP16 will last two weeks and put the spotlight on the interdependent challenges facing the planet.
"Even if the global geopolitical context overshadows these crucial meetings, this kind of astral conjunction may perhaps lead to concrete decisions," hopes Mauro Centritto, an expert in sustainable plant protection at Italy's National Research Council. According to Centritto, who will be representing Western European civil society organizations in Riyadh, the time has come to "build synergies" between the three COPs, as global warming, compared to pre-industrial levels, is likely to exceed the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement in 2015. "If we don't fight together against increasing droughts and advancing land degradation, we will never achieve the goals we have set ourselves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect flora and fauna," he claimed.
For many participants, Riyadh's COP16 is, in fact, the core of the issue. "Our number one objective is to raise global awareness, both of the issue of desertification, and its interconnection with the issues addressed in the other two COPs," explained its spokesperson, Osama Ibrahim Faqeeha, in an interview with Le Monde.
The Saudi deputy environment minister condemned "the misunderstanding" surrounding COP16. "The general public wrongly believes that this is just another COP that only concerns desert countries like Saudi Arabia. Desertification affects everyone because it includes not only the expansion of deserts, but also soil degradation and loss of fertility, which raises questions about water resources and food security. There is therefore an urgent need to mobilize," he stressed.
According to two reports commissioned by the Science-Policy Interface (SPI) of the UNCCD at the previous COP held in May 2022 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, there is cause for concern. Between the periods 1961 to 1990 and 1991 to 2020, arid zones expanded from 37.5% to 40.6% of the world's land surface, excluding Antarctica, an increase of around 4.3 million square kilometers. "Hyper-arid" regions have been identified in the Atacama Desert in Chile and Peru, the Sahara, Namibia, the Arabian Peninsula, China and Mongolia, accounting for 9.1% of the total. Other arid zones can be found in the southeastern United States, Mexico, Brazil and, above all, on the African and Asian continents. The Mediterranean region is also affected.
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