Singer-songwriter Yusuf ‘Cat Stevens’ Islam speaks during the closing session of the Global Tipping Points Conference in Kuala Lumpur. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

With the city enveloped in a cloak of haze, the urgency of tackling the climate crisis could hardly have been clearer as the four-day Global Tipping Points Conference 2026 drew to a close at Malaysia’s Sunway University on Thursday.

At the conference, speakers stressed the need for humanity to remain within planetary boundaries, or the “safe operating space”.

Crossing these boundaries could have catastrophic consequences, warned Professor Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the conference organisers.

He highlighted the dangers of triggering irreversible changes in major Earth systems. Some of the bulwarks have already been breached, manifesting themselves in the form of collapsed ice sheets, bleached corals, shrinking wildlife habitats and the slow death of rainforests.

Dong Wang’s park in Bangkok. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

‘Tipping points’ conference brings together climate scientists, activists, and finance gurus; highlights success stories from around the world

All of this threatens food security, causes displacement, damages human health and destabilises economies.

With plenty of reasons to be pessimistic – social and political polarisation, rising inequality and poverty, and wars among them – the message was nevertheless one of urgency rather than despair. “The science has matured, evidence is there… it is time for action… that’s the natural step,” said Sultan Nazrin Shah of Perak.

But there is another side to the tipping-point story.

Professor Timothy Lenton, chair of Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter and one of the organisers, spoke about “positive tipping points.” Lenton, who has studied tipping points since the 1990s, argued these could help societies move towards more sustainable futures. Citing Pakistan’s solar boom and Norway’s rapid adoption of electric vehicles, he pointed to transformative shifts that can happen within a relatively short period.

But protecting ecosystems is as important as technologies, said Acehnese forest conservator Farwiza Farhan, while making a compelling case for the protection of the Leuser Ecosystem – a tropical rainforest reserve in Sumatra and one of the last places on Earth where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans coexist in the wild.

Others turned to imagining the future. Anab Jain, co-founder of London-based Superflux, described Mitigation of Shock, an immersive installation set in a fictional 2050. Visitors enter an imagined apartment shaped by a future in which some of the most severe impacts of climate change have already occurred. More than 100,000 people have visited it since 2017, she said.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, broadened the discussion to social, economic and political tipping points. If these systems tipped in the wrong direction, he warned, they could trigger a “cascade of devastating consequences.”

Planetary changes and social, economic and political conditions are deeply interconnected, said Sachs, making cooperation essential to averting disaster. He repeatedly pointed to poverty and inequality as forces that could deepen instability but argued that all was not lost. The tools for change – economic wellbeing, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and peace and cooperation among nations – already exist, he said.

Discussions also covered deforestation, land-use change, governance failures and the rise of artificial intelligence. Turning tools into action, however, requires money, policy and political will.

“But where’s the money?” many asked, urging encouragement for supportive policies and a pipeline of “bankable projects” that protect nature, so that economic incentives favour regeneration over extraction. One such approach came from Dr Ralph Chami, founder of Blue Green Future, who outlined his concept of “regenerative GDP”, i.e. recognising the value of “living nature” and accounting for it on the balance sheet.

Timothy Lenton explaining the positive tipping points. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

“Why kill the goose that lays the [golden] egg?” he asked, contrasting a living coral reef in the Maldives – which provides a habitat for fish and plays a role in the marine carbon cycle – with a bleached one that can threaten both tourism and fisheries.

But money and markets are only part of the equation. Dr Jemilah Mahmood, executive director of the Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University, insisted on channelling youth energy. “Give them space at policy [discussions], send them to COPs not as tokenism, but let them negotiate. It’s their future,” she said.

As an example of what young people can achieve, Mahmood pointed to Pacific Island law students whose campaign helped bring climate change and human rights before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Their efforts contributed to a landmark advisory opinion in July 2025, clarifying states’ legal obligations on climate change. Climate litigation and the role of legal action in holding governments accountable also featured in the wider conversation.

The highlight of the conference was definitely the success stories from around the world that offered the most tangible hope.

For example, Chinese urban planner Dong Wang, who specialises in sponge cities and ecological planning, shared a low-cost, low-maintenance and replicable project in the heart of Bangkok – the transformation of a former tobacco factory into the 102-acre Benjakitti Forest Park, to which more than 200 bird species have since returned.

Eva Gladek of Metabolic, who spoke about NetZeroCities, showed how 17 old houseboats in Amsterdam were retrofitted with clean technologies and transformed into energy-efficient offices and workspaces.

Mumbai-based Sheela Patel, director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, drew on five decades of work with people living in informal settlements to highlight another kind of urban resilience. Through the ‘Roof Over Our Heads’ campaign, women supported by young professionals are helping make homes more resilient to rain, strong winds and extreme heat.

And these efforts are not simply one-off experiments. Patel said the work has been documented and shared, with more than 100 labs established across 20 countries to help communities test and replicate solutions. Gladek, meanwhile, is helping 100 European cities work towards climate neutrality.

The thought-provoking conference had opened on a note of faith, with Sultan Nazrin Shah speaking of humanity’s responsibility to care for the planet, which he said “comes with privilege and obligation” but is “not a burden to be feared”.

It ended on a rather philosophical and spiritual note, with British singer-writer Yusuf ‘Cat Stevens’ Islam urging people to become the change rather than expecting the world to change. “Never stop being a child, as there is light in their eyes and they see hope,” he said, also stressing the need to bring spirituality into education. “Look how the curriculum has been colonised.”

For positive tipping points to hold, science alone will not be enough, concluded Mahmood. It will also need the voices of those whose futures are at stake.

Note: Published with the permission of Dawn.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Woodlands in nearly every forested country face threats from climate-change-driven fires and deforestation pressures fueled by economic interests exploiting natural resources. Credit: Imran Schah/IPS

By Stephanie Dowlen
MALMO, Sweden, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

On Monday, governments from across the world will gather in Armenia for COP17, the UN biodiversity summit, to assess progress on the global agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. For anyone who cares about the livability of our planet for future generations, and the richness of life on earth, the stakes could hardly be higher. Policy makers will debate targets, implementation, and the lack of money to protect nature, in particular the failure of developed countries to fulfil their obligations. But there is a more basic question that should put at the center of those discussions: what happens when the financial system governments are counting on to fund nature protection is also financing its destruction?

A new analysis by the Forests & Finance coalition provides an alarming answer. Since 2020, banks have provided $595 billion to companies operating in high-risk agribusiness and metal and mineral mining sectors across tropical forest regions. Of that, $351 billion went to agro-commodities and $244 billion to mining. These are among the primary industries driving deforestation, land degradation, pollution and conflicts with communities across the tropical forest regions of South America, Southeast Asia and Central and West Africa.

The significance of that figure goes beyond the amount of money involved. It exposes a fundamental weakness in the way the biodiversity crisis is being addressed. Governments have committed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to aligning financial flows with biodiversity goals, yet financial institutions remain largely free to finance nature destruction as a risk to themselves rather than as harm they may in fact be helping to cause.

Nature-related risks are not like ordinary financial risks. A bank might assess how drought could affect a company’s revenues without adequately considering whether the company itself helped create that vulnerability by clearing forests, draining wetlands or degrading watersheds. By the time those consequences appear on a balance sheet, an ecosystem may already have crossed a threshold from which recovery is extremely difficult. The report finds that current financial risk frameworks and sustainability policies remain woefully ill-equipped to assess these real-world impacts.

The consequences are already visible in some of the world’s most important forest landscapes. In Brazil, banks have provided $83 billion to the soy sector since 2020, including $6.8 billion this year alone, despite the collapse in January of the Amazon Soy Moratorium, which had been credited with reducing soy-driven deforestation by 69 percent in monitored areas. The withdrawal of major exporters from the agreement removed a critical safeguard and traceability system keeping forests standing, yet banks have not publicly taken a position on its collapse.

Indonesia presents a similarly disturbing pattern. Banks have provided $67.1 billion to the country’s notoriously destructive pulp and palm oil sectors since 2020, including financing for companies associated with repeated breaches of their own commitments to avoid deforestation, peatland development and exploitation. Peat drainage and deforestation leave landscapes less able to retain water and resist fire, increasing the vulnerability of communities to climate extremes.

At the same time, the financial flows behind mining are growing rapidly. Governments and companies are scrambling to secure copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and other minerals needed for energy technologies, while demand is also being driven by geopolitical competition and the expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Financing for mining in tropical forest-rich countries increased 55 percent between 2016 and 2025, with lithium financing increasing more than elevenfold and nickel financing by 183 percent.

There is a danger in treating every new mine as part of a clean transition simply because its minerals may eventually be used in low-carbon technologies. Mining in tropical forest regions is associated with ecosystem destruction, pollution, land conflicts, violence and violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights. A transition that sacrifices some of the world’s most biodiverse landscapes and the people who depend on them is not sustainable, whatever the end product.

What makes this particularly troubling is how little protection many banks actually require before providing this financing. The average score in the report’s assessment of bank policies covering forest-risk agro-commodities is only 25 percent, while 39 percent of banks assessed scored below 20 percent. JPMorgan Chase, one of the world’s largest and most influential banks, scored just 18 percent.

Voluntary commitments have done little to close this gap. Governments now need to establish binding rules requiring financial institutions to conduct meaningful environmental and human rights due diligence across corporate groups and supply chains, disclose where their money is going and what impacts that financing is associated with, and face consequences when they finance severe and unresolved harms.

Financial regulators also need to recognize biodiversity loss as more than a distant environmental concern. Tropical forests underpin food systems, water supplies and economic activity, while their degradation can create cascading risks across economies. Yet there is still no equivalent to the regulatory framework used for financial institutions considered systemically important, even as the degradation of these natural systems threatens consequences that extend far beyond individual companies or projects.

But banks should not wait for governments to act. They can establish clear red lines against deforestation, ecosystem conversion and serious human rights abuses, make those requirements enforceable in financing agreements, independently verify compliance and suspend or terminate financing when clients fail to address serious violations. Those safeguards must respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, including Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and provide affected communities with meaningful access to remedy.

The choice facing governments at COP17 is therefore not simply how much money to mobilize for biodiversity. It is whether they are prepared to stop the financial system from undermining those investments in the first place.

The evidence is increasingly difficult to dismiss. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into industries that are rapidly degrading the natural systems on which economies, and the web of life, depend. Governments have already promised to align financial flows with biodiversity goals. Now they need to make that commitment real.

At COP17, following the money would be a good place to start.

IPS UN Bureau

A new report on deforestation reflects the persistent gap between global ambitions to conserve and restore forests and enduring practices that continue to destroy them. Credit: UN Climate Change/Diego Herculano

By Umar Manzoor Shah
BERLIN, Germany/WASHINGTON, D.C., USA , Oct 14 2026 (IPS)

The world lost more than 7 million hectares of forest to deforestation in 2025, a modest improvement on recent years but still far from what is needed to meet global forest protection targets by 2030, according to a new assessment of international conservation efforts.

The Forest Declaration Assessment 2026, prepared by a coalition of civil society organisations and researchers and released worldwide on October 14, says deforestation remains stubbornly high despite international commitments to halt and reverse forest loss. The average annual area cleared since 2021 has exceeded 8 million hectares, highlighting the gap between government promises and progress on the ground.

Ivan Palmegiani, senior consultant at Climate Focus and one of the key report authors, told Inter Press Service in an exclusive interview that a key reason deforestation remains so high is that commitments have not been matched by the scale of action needed, and where action has been taken, it has not always been sufficient to deliver lasting impact.

“We have seen what is possible under dedicated political leadership, such as the Lula administration in Brazil, where targeted policies, enforcement, and political will reduced deforestation within a single term. However, these successes remain the exception rather than the norm, and they can be quickly reversed when priorities change.”

He added that at a deeper level, forest commitments have not been translated into the structural transformation in how natural resources are governed and used. Forests, Palmegiani said, continue to face strong economic pressures from agriculture, infrastructure, extraction, and other land uses, while decision-making systems and incentives still frequently favour the powerful few, who are physically and emotionally disconnected from forests, rather than the many who depend on them for their livelihoods, well-being, and cultural identity. “Until our societies, political and economic systems change how decisions about forests and other ecosystems are made, forest loss is likely to remain high despite global pledges.”

Ivan Palmegiani, senior consultant at Climate Focus and one of the authors of the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026. Credit: Supplied

The report also found that at least 65.4 million hectares of forest worldwide lost ecological integrity in 2024 because of human activities. The figure highlights a problem that extends beyond the complete removal of trees. Forests can remain standing while losing biodiversity, carbon storage capacity and their ability to sustain wildlife and local communities.

“Both figures reflect a persistent gap between global ambitions to conserve and restore forests and enduring practices that keep destroying them,” the report says.

The assessment examines progress on forest protection, sustainable production, finance and governance. It finds that some initiatives are moving forward, including efforts to improve forest monitoring and recognise Indigenous land rights. But these developments have not yet produced the scale of change required to reverse forest destruction.

More than 140 countries pledged under the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use, announced at the 2021 United Nations climate conference, to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.

Five years later, the latest assessment suggests that the world remains far from achieving that objective.

Tropical forests face particular pressure from agricultural expansion, infrastructure development and commercial activities. The report says these pressures are reinforced by weak enforcement of environmental laws and economic incentives that continue to favour activities associated with forest destruction.

‘We No Longer Look at Country-Level Figures’

Tropical Latin America recorded the largest absolute area of deforestation among the regions assessed but also made the most significant progress compared with the 2018-20 baseline. Deforestation there fell by 33 percent in 2025.

Tropical Africa, however, experienced a continued rise in forest loss. Annual deforestation in the region reached about 2.4 million hectares in 2025, comparable to the 2.5 million hectares recorded in tropical Latin America.

Tropical Asia lost approximately 1.6 million hectares of forest in 2025. That represented a 12 percent reduction compared with the 2018-20 baseline, although the report cautions that the underlying causes of deforestation remain largely unchanged.

The assessment describes tropical Asia’s progress as ambiguous. Two consecutive years of modest declines may indicate that the worst recent peaks have passed, but they do not establish that the region is on a sustained path towards forest recovery.

Tropical Oceania was the only tropical region assessed as being on track to meet its 2030 forest goals. Its relatively small share of global tropical forest area and lower current pressure on forests partly explain this difference.

The findings underline how national policies, commodity production and enforcement capacity can produce sharply different outcomes across regions.

When asked which countries have contributed most to this progress and what challenges continue to prevent deeper reductions in terms of deforestation, Palmegiani said, “We no longer look at country-level figures because the global datasets used for our calculations can sometimes misrepresent national trends. In fact, to avoid overstating the precision of the data, we only publish regional and global aggregates for our indicators.”

He added, ”That said, independent analyses and regional initiatives suggest that Indonesia and Malaysia have been important contributors to the decline in deforestation observed across tropical Asia. Despite this progress, the region continues to face significant economic pressures. These include growing demand for critical minerals, particularly nickel, of which Indonesia is the world’s leading exporter, as well as broader economic uncertainty linked to geopolitical conflicts and disruptions in global markets. When these pressures intensify, short-term economic priorities can outweigh environmental considerations, and forests often bear the cost.”

Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Interests

Agriculture remains a major driver of forest loss, with commercial production and growing demand for food, animal feed and bioenergy putting pressure on natural ecosystems.

The report says between 61 and 94% of tropical deforestation linked to commercial agriculture may be illegal. It estimates that environmental crime, including illegal deforestation and timber and wildlife trafficking, generates as much as US$281 billion annually.

Such activities often overlap with other criminal enterprises.

A 2025 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, cited in the assessment, found links between environmental offences and crimes including drug trafficking, illegal mining and human trafficking.

The scale of these activities presents a major challenge for governments seeking to protect forests while regulating international commodity supply chains.

The assessment also points to gaps in corporate accountability. Companies in sectors linked to forest loss have increasingly adopted sustainability commitments and reporting systems, but disclosure and implementation remain uneven.

Financial institutions have begun to recognise deforestation as an environmental and financial risk. Yet the report says many regulatory frameworks lack detailed guidance on how banks should assess and manage those risks.

More than 60 percent of the countries assessed had yet to establish disclosure requirements covering deforestation-related risks for banks or insurance companies.

The report’s findings suggest that voluntary commitments and corporate reporting need to be accompanied by stronger enforcement and clearer requirements if they are to produce measurable changes in production and investment.

Forest Finance Remains a Major Challenge

The assessment identifies the scale and distribution of finance as another obstacle to forest protection.

Although international funding commitments have increased, financial support for conservation remains difficult to reconcile with the economic incentives that encourage activities harmful to forests.

The report estimates that subsidies linked to the production and use of fossil fuels reached $921 billion in 2024. Emergency measures introduced in 2026 to ease high energy prices could push the global total above $1 trillion this year.

The assessment warns that such subsidies can undermine efforts to shift to less harmful energy sources.

It also highlights the potential benefits of redirecting public support to activities that restore nature.

“Every dollar of agricultural support that is repurposed to support farming practices that restore nature, such as agroforestry, silvopasture, and low-carbon agriculture, can generate up to USD 30 in economic benefits, especially for rural communities,” the report says.

The findings point to an opportunity for governments to reform existing spending rather than rely entirely on new funding.

However, the report notes that international forest finance does not consistently reach the Indigenous peoples and local communities who manage and protect forest territories.

Community-led funding mechanisms can help direct resources towards local priorities, but they remain secondary recipients of direct funding from governments and multilateral institutions.

Indigenous Rights and Participation

The assessment identifies recognition of Indigenous land rights as an important part of effective forest governance.

At the 2025 United Nations climate conference, known as COP30, an intergovernmental commitment involving 16 countries and one subnational jurisdiction pledged to recognise or strengthen rights over an additional 160 million hectares of Indigenous lands and territories.

The launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility also created a provision reserving 20 percent of country-level payouts for direct transfers to Indigenous and local community organisations.

These developments represent progress, but the report says participation in international policymaking does not necessarily translate into decision-making power.

Indigenous coalitions have stressed that their increased presence at COP30 remained largely consultative. Indigenous peoples still lack formal standing in the United Nations climate negotiations, such as COP 31, which will take place in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9 to 20.

National climate plans also frequently mention Indigenous peoples and local communities without specifying how they will participate in designing or implementing policies.

A 2026 review of 84 national climate plans found that 61 referred to under-represented groups, including Indigenous peoples and local communities. However, the assessment says most references were descriptive rather than linked to concrete measures.

The report argues that meaningful participation requires more than recognition in policy documents. It requires secure land rights, opportunities to influence decisions and access to the financial resources needed to manage territories.

Environmental Defenders Face Continuing Threats

Forest protection also carries serious risks for people who challenge illegal activities and defend community land.

The assessment cites Global Witness data showing that at least 124 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2025. More than half of the documented killings were linked to land disputes, and nearly three-quarters of the victims were Indigenous people, small-scale farmers or people of African descent.

Front Line Defenders separately reported that at least 358 human rights defenders were killed in 28 countries in 2025. Those working on land, environmental and peasant rights, as well as Indigenous rights, were among the groups that were frequently targeted.

Erin Matson, a lead consultant of Climate Focus and report author, told IPS in an interview that the statistics from Global Witness that we cite each year are always humbling. It’s important to remember that that figure is likely a significant underestimate, as many killings and disappearances go unreported.

Erin Matson, a lead consultant of Climate Focus and one of the authors of the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026. Credit: Supplied

“There are many factors at play, most of which are rooted in governance. The vast majority of environmental defenders are killed over land disputes, for example, when a mining operation encroaches on Indigenous territories. If those Indigenous communities do not have secure, recognised tenure rights to their territories, it makes it that much harder for them to resist operators who are acting illegally.”

She added that, therefore, securing tenure rights is a major step that governments need to enable. Next, Matson added that an environment of corruption and impunity allows actors to literally get away with murder. “In locations where government actors and law enforcement are under the sway and on the payroll of special interests, they will look the other way when people are harmed. Rooting out corruption, therefore, and instituting reforms to corrupted systems is essential. It must be ensured that public officials are paid well for their services so that they won’t be susceptible to corruption in the first place.”

The report identifies weak enforcement, limited government capacity and impunity for powerful actors as major obstacles to effective forest governance.

It also warns that environmental defenders face forms of intimidation beyond lethal violence, including criminalisation, threats and harassment.

Improved technology is helping authorities detect illegal forest clearance. Satellite monitoring, traceability systems and new investigative tools can help identify offences and strengthen cooperation across borders.

In Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, for example, researchers are testing artificial intelligence-powered acoustic sensors designed to recognise chainsaws, gunshots and engines. The technology can alert rangers to potential illegal logging in remote areas that are difficult to patrol regularly.

But the report stresses that improved detection must be matched by fair and effective enforcement. Otherwise, small-scale producers and local communities may carry a disproportionate share of the burden while more powerful actors escape accountability.

The report reveals further that deforestation in 2025 was lower than in much of the preceding decade, and forest finance has increased. Monitoring systems have also improved, while several countries have taken steps towards recognising Indigenous land rights.

But the report cautions against interpreting these gains as evidence of a lasting turnaround.

It says the reduction in deforestation may partly reflect temporary factors, including stronger enforcement in some jurisdictions, changing commodity prices and economic conditions that slowed land conversion.

“These wins should not be mistaken for the transformation still needed,” reads the report.

IPS UN Bureau Report

By Madhu Rao and Tyson Miller
SINGAPORE, Oct 9 2026 (IPS)

When governments gather in Yerevan this month for the 17th UN Convention on Biological Diversity, they will weigh a promise nearly 200 countries adopted six years ago: to effectively conserve at least 30 percent of land, inland waters, and sea by 2030. Achieving the ambitious 30×30 target is essential to sustaining the systems humanity relies on for survival—including crop pollination, purification of water and air, and climate regulation—as well as the biodiversity that underpins food production, fisheries, and tourism.

Unfortunately, the world is not on track to achieve this target. Moreover, the emphasis on the quantitative dimension of the 30×30 target has often overshadowed its more critical objective: ensuring that areas of high biodiversity value are protected, conserved, and connected through effective and equitable management.

The struggle to deliver on international commitments reflects a fundamental challenge. The Global Biodiversity Framework requires countries to halt and reverse biodiversity loss while pursuing economic growth, and businesses are increasingly expected to mitigate nature-related impacts. The ongoing expansion in infrastructure, mining, and the energy transition places additional pressure on biodiversity-rich ecosystems, creating difficult trade-offs that must be carefully managed.

The fundamental question remains: how do we reconcile economic development with meeting biodiversity commitments?

A new analysis of tropical countries contains insights vital to answering that question. Most importantly, it found that oil and gas concessions overlap nearly 61 million hectares—roughly two and a half times the size of the United Kingdom—of protected and conserved areas. Mining concessions overlap another 43 million hectares. Such conditions can turn protected and conserved areas into ‘paper parks’: places protected in law but vulnerable to extractive industries in practice.

What the Maps Reveal

The analysis examined a wide range of some of the world’s most vital ecosystems and the industrial pressures closing in on them—oil and gas, mining, industrial logging, and large-scale agriculture—across the Amazon, Central America, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, with further examples from the Global North. The report focused on the tropical forests and marine ecosystems that not only harbor irreplaceable biodiversity but also remain at the center of conflicts between extraction and conservation.

Senegal, for example, is close on paper to protecting 30 percent of its territory, yet oil and gas blocks cover 99 percent of both the country’s protected areas and identified Key Biodiversity Areas. The remaining undisturbed forest in Cambodia largely lies inside protected areas, yet a fifth of those areas face mining concessions and most contain land of interest to oil and gas companies. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, nearly three-quarters of the ambitious new Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor overlaps with oil and gas blocks included in a recent licensing round.

This contradiction between conservation in policy and extraction in practice can also be seen in high income countries. The United States has opened Bears Ears National Monument to mining and is threatening new oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the UK also allows fossil-fuel companies to drill in protected areas.

There is further tension. Some of the mining pushing into protected areas is for minerals fueling the energy transition. Securing a stable climate and securing nature are both essential, and one should not be pursued by quietly sacrificing the other.

We need to consider not only how much additional territory must be brought under protection by 2030, but whether areas already counted as protected and conserved are genuinely conserved, effectively managed, and delivering meaningful biodiversity outcomes.

The Path Forward

High-integrity implementation of 30×30 means prioritizing places that matter most for biodiversity and ensuring they remain ecologically intact, connected, effectively conserved, and equitably governed. It means upholding Indigenous Peoples’ and local community rights and protecting these places from incompatible extractive and large-scale industrial activities.

There are four critical components. The first is the mitigation hierarchy, which calls for avoiding harm whenever possible before considering other measures. Areas of highest biodiversity value, including strictly protected areas, should be no-go zones for extractive industry.

The second is policy coherence. A protected area sits with a ministry of environment while a mining concession sits with a ministry of mines or energy, and unless biodiversity is built into the decisions of every economic sector, the two will keep colliding.

The third is biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning, which enables governments to clearly recognize where nature is protected and where development can proceed. Protect here, develop there.

Finally, effective and equitable governance, including rights-based approaches, is essential. Indigenous peoples and local communities steward some of the world’s most intact and biodiverse lands, including many areas of global importance for biodiversity. Their rights, knowledge and leadership are central to effective conservation.

With only four years left, the commitment worth making in Yerevan is durable protection for the areas that matter most, so they remain intact, connected, and free of the industries that would undermine them. We must make sure that 30×30 is not a promise that only exists on a map, but is a pathway to true biodiversity protection for our collective survival.

Madhu Rao, Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and Tyson Miller, Executive Director of Earth Insight

IPS UN Bureau

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Oct 6 2026 (IPS)

One night, many years ago now, on a remote beach in the outer islands of Seychelles, I sat in the darkness and watched a green turtle come ashore. She had waited for the heat of the day to leave the sand. Under a sky crowded with stars, she hauled herself slowly above the tideline, dug with a patience no human hand could match, and laid her eggs. Then, in the small hours, she turned back toward the water. She did not hurry. She paused once, as though listening, and then made her slow, unhesitating way down the sand, back to a home older than any I could imagine.

James Alix Michel

We, the human beings watching from the shore, are the ones who wonder.

This, I have come to believe, is the deepest source of the trouble we now find ourselves in. Not our tools, not our economies, not even our numbers, though all of these press hard upon the living world. The deepest source is an older mistake: the unexamined assumption that we stand outside nature, deciding its fate. That the Earth is a stage and we are its principal players, and that everything else, the reef, the forest, the migrating whale, the green turtle, is scenery, resource, or backdrop.

The truth is far more humbling. We are not the authors of nature. We are its late arrivals.

Consider the arithmetic of belonging. The Earth is some four and a half billion years old. Life appeared here almost four billion years ago. Coral reefs were already ancient when the dinosaurs walked. Forests had been breathing for hundreds of millions of years before the first upright ape rose on the savannah. The calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon that composes almost everything we are, was forged in stars that lived and died long before this planet existed. To imagine ourselves separate from nature is not merely a philosophical mistake. It is a physical impossibility.

We Seychellois have a particular reason to understand this, for we are late arrivals twice over. Our granite islands are among the oldest islands on Earth, the only oceanic islands made of granite: fragments of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, left behind in the middle of the ocean when India drifted away some sixty-five million years ago. For almost all of that immense time, no human foot touched them. The turtles came, and the seabirds, and the giant tortoises. We came only in 1770, when a small party of Europeans, Africans and Indians stepped ashore on Sainte Anne. Others followed, from Africa, from India, from China, from Europe, some by choice and many, let us never forget, in chains. From that meeting of peoples, in scarcely two and a half centuries, a nation was born.

And something remarkable happened. A people with no ancestral memory of these islands learned, within a few generations, to belong to them. Our grandparents learned to read the sea as others read books. They gave thanks to the ocean before setting out and again on returning, and spoke of it as one speaks of a mother. Their kinship was not inherited; it was learned. That, to me, is among the most hopeful facts I know: belonging can be learned.

There is a school of thought, gathering strength in our time, that invites the whole of humanity to learn it too. Some call it biocentrism, the recognition that life in all its forms carries moral weight. Others call it deep ecology, the insistence that the human being is one strand in a vast web, not the loom on which the web is woven. The American conservationist Aldo Leopold put it most simply, many decades ago: we must learn to think “like a mountain.” The names matter less than the instinct behind them: that the living world is not a possession, and that our first duty to it is not extraction but attention.

This is why the environmental struggle feels to me, at its deepest level, like a spiritual struggle as much as an economic one. The numbers we use to measure our crisis are necessary and true, but they cannot on their own move the human heart. What moves the heart is the recognition that we are kin to what we are losing. That the coral bleaching in a lagoon is not a distant statistic but family. That the night sky above the nesting beach is not decoration but a memory of our own origin.

I do not offer this as sentiment. I offer it as strategy. For decades we have tried to persuade humanity to protect the Earth by appealing to self-interest. The argument is true, but it has not been sufficient. Self-interest is a thin thread from which to hang the future of a planet. What is needed now is the older and stronger thread of kinship. And kinship, once acted upon, is answered. On Aldabra, where green turtles were once taken in great numbers, decades of patient protection have allowed the nesting population to multiply several times over. The sea, it seems, is ready to forgive us, if we are ready to belong.

James Alix Michel, is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

Seaweed farmers tend their crop off Zanzibar, where rising sea temperatures are putting pressure on a vital coastal livelihood, according to the new Copernicus ocean report. Credit: Zuberi Mussa/IPS

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Sep 30 2026 (IPS)

Fatuma Makame learned to farm seaweed in the shallow water where her parents worked. These days, she grows it farther from shore.

In the shallows, warmer water has left the crop more vulnerable to poor growth and disease. Conditions can be better farther out, but working there requires a boat, equipment, and the skills to handle deeper water. Makame joined Mwani Zanzibar Mamas—a cooperative union that obtained a boat and farming gear. She has since reported larger, more reliable harvests.

The decision she faced is becoming familiar to seaweed farmers along Zanzibar’s coast: move the crop, if they can afford to, or keep planting where it has become harder to grow.

A new assessment of the world’s oceans gives that local difficulty a wider context. The 10th Copernicus Ocean State Report, released today (September 30), describes an ocean absorbing more heat, rising along coastlines and becoming more acidic. It was produced by Mercator Ocean International through the European Union’s Copernicus Marine Service.

“The ocean is transforming before our eyes: warming, rising seas and ecosystem degradation are interconnected signs of significant and long-term change. It is our responsibility to build the permanent capacity to anticipate this transformation,” said Pierre Bahurel, director-general of Mercator Ocean International.

According to the report, the global ocean absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules of heat in 2025 — roughly 40 times the energy the world consumed that year. Global mean sea level rose by an average of 3.8 millimetres a year between 1999 and 2025; the rate was 4.2 millimetres a year from 2012 to 2025. The report also says the ocean became approximately 17 percent more acidic between 1985 and 2025.

Those are global measurements. They do not describe the water at Makame’s farm or explain the result of any one planting season. But Zanzibar’s seaweed farmers have had to contend with warmer water for years.

Across Unguja and Pemba, seaweed provides income for thousands of households, many of them headed or supported by women. Farmers tie seedlings to lines, tend them in the water, then harvest and dry the crop for sale. A poor harvest can leave less money for food, school fees and the next planting.

The Food and Agriculture Organization has documented how warmer water can inhibit seaweed growth and make it more susceptible to disease. Moving farms into deeper, cooler water presents other difficulties: stronger currents can damage the crop, and many farmers cannot swim or lack the equipment to work there safely. Low prices further limit what they can spend on changing their methods.

Tanzanian marine scientist Narriman Jiddawi has documented related problems farther south, on Songo Songo Island. In one study commissioned by the Institute of Marine Sciences, she recorded unusually warm water and signs of disease at shallow farming sites that had been abandoned.

“Farming is failing in many cultivation sites in shallow intertidal areas where it used to grow well,” she said. Their measurements were taken at Songo Songo, not at Makame’s farm in Zanzibar.

The Copernicus report also examines the ocean territories of small island developing states. It finds that all their exclusive economic zones have experienced ocean warming since 1960. About 65% of their combined ocean area has been exposed to accelerating sea-level rise since 1999. Among the Indian Ocean members of that group, the figure is 33%

Zanzibar is part of Tanzania, rather than a separate small island developing state, so those percentages are not figures for the archipelago. The findings nevertheless speak to risks faced by island communities whose incomes and homes depend on the sea.

“Small Island Developing States are experiencing multiple dimensions of ocean change at once. Nearly two-thirds of their ocean territories are exposed to accelerating sea-level rise, while warming seas are increasing pressure on coral reefs, fisheries and coastal communities,” said Karina von Schuckmann, director of the Copernicus Ocean State Report.

“For island states, ocean change is not a distant environmental issue; it is an immediate economic, development and security challenge – and a warning of what many other coastlines will face in the future.”

For fishing families, the condition of coral reefs is one concern. Reefs provide habitat for fish and help reduce the force of waves reaching shore. Severe heat can cause corals to bleach, and repeated episodes can hinder their recovery.

The report finds that about a quarter of threatened coral reefs within the ocean territories of small island developing states experienced accumulated, mortality-level heat stress for at least one month between 1982 and 2025. That is a finding for those states collectively, not an assessment of Zanzibar’s reefs.

There is local evidence of damage. Researchers from the State University of Zanzibar examined reef observations spanning 1992 to 2016. They found severe declines in hard coral cover following the El Niño events of 1998 and 2016, though the extent of change differed substantially between reefs.

Heat is only one of the pressures on them. Pollution and damaging fishing practices can make recovery harder. Reducing those local pressures will not cool the Indian Ocean, but it may improve the prospects for reefs that survive a period of extreme heat.

Rising seas pose a separate challenge to coastal settlements. A World Bank assessment identifies Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania’s coast as vulnerable to erosion, flooding and damage to infrastructure and marine habitats.

For authorities deciding where to protect homes or restrict construction, measurements of tides, storms, reefs and mangroves need to be considered alongside what residents know about places where water already reaches houses and roads.

Through the Agriculture and Fisheries Development Programme, seaweed farmers in Unguja and Pemba have received training in planting, handling and processing. Improved drying racks and solar dryers help keep harvested seaweed away from sand and rain, reducing losses after it comes ashore.

Other farmers are exploring additional sources of income. FAO has trained seaweed farmers on Zanzibar’s east coast in sea cucumber cultivation. That work requires suitable sites, equipment and buyers and will not suit every household.

Financial protection is being explored as well. The United Nations Development Programme, Zanzibar’s disaster management authorities and the Ministry of Blue Economy and Fisheries are developing a climate-risk insurance proposal for seaweed farmers in Unguja and Pemba. It remains a proposal. Its usefulness will depend on which losses it covers, what farmers must pay, and how quickly they can settle a claim.

For Makame, the cooperative’s boat and gear made it possible to try farming farther offshore. Other farmers still work the shallows. Whether they can follow her depends on access to equipment, training and a way to bear the risk if a new method fails.

The Copernicus report tracks changes across decades. On Zanzibar’s coast, a farmer must decide where to put her next lines of seaweed.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

Member of Smallholder Farmer Alliance in Haiti with tree she is about to plant. Credit: A.F. Cortes/SFA

By Hugh Locke
NEW YORK, Sep 30 2026 (IPS)

Years ago, standing in a small farmer’s field in Haiti, I began to suspect that we had agriculture backward. The development world saw a man in need of rescue. I saw a farmer who might help rescue the rest of us.

That distinction matters. Over the next 25 years, humanity will need to grow much more food on a planet with degraded soils, shrinking biodiversity and a destabilizing climate. The usual instinct is to seek a technical fix. I want to suggest another source of help: a moral idea rooted in religion.

I am not a theologian. I am a development worker. In 2010, Haitian agronomist Timote Georges and I co-founded the Smallholder Farmers Alliance. We now work with about 10,000 farmers throughout Haiti who grow more food while rebuilding degraded land. Our “tree currency” rewards them for planting and caring for trees with credits they can exchange for seeds, tools and training.

Hugh Locke

Roughly 475 million smallholder farms, each under five acres, already produce about 30% of the world’s food despite limited access to finance, markets or technical support. In my new book, Whole Earth Farming, I argue that if even half of these families received support to adopt regenerative methods, they could produce the additional food humanity will need through 2050 on 12% of the world’s arable land, with a climate benefit comparable to offsetting the aviation industry’s annual emissions.

The Green Revolution averted famine, but its gains often came with degraded soils, diminished biodiversity and polluted water. Regenerative farming aims not merely to limit damage but to restore soil, rebuild biodiversity, improve farmers’ wellbeing and deliver a net climate benefit.

That is the language investors expect. Yet a case study more than a century old anticipated this approach, and its foundation was not market logic but morality.

From 1901 to 1921, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, one of the central figures of the Baha’i Faith, directed a farming settlement called ‘Adasiyyih in the Jordan Valley. Long before the term “regenerative agriculture” existed, the community used crop rotation, agroforestry, water conservation and integrated livestock management to make the land productive without exhausting it. Just as important was the framework behind those techniques: the belief that the earth is one country and humanity one interdependent family, expressed through consultation, equality and a rejection of extraction for its own sake. Farming at ‘Adasiyyih was not simply commodity production. It was a way to build community.

Regenerative agriculture does not require religious belief. Many successful regenerative farmers are secular, and the science stands on its own. But ‘Adasiyyih addressed, on a limited scale, a coordination problem that still hinders the movement: how can independent farmers, financiers, governments and companies be persuaded to treat soil health, water and biodiversity as a shared obligation?

‘Adasiyyih began with a moral premise rather than a technical formula. That premise is worth borrowing, whether one calls it stewardship or enlightened self-interest. Farmers, buyers and governments must act as though what happens to one plot of land is everyone’s concern, because increasingly it is. For generations we have asked how much the earth can give us. We should also ask what we owe in return.

Regenerative agriculture is at a fragile moment. By my estimate, some 15 million farms and ranches worldwide now use regenerative practices, and some 25 million acres, mostly in the United States, are certified under third-party standards, though almost none of that land is farmed by smallholders. The movement is growing faster than the systems meant to support it. Farmers can face lower yields and higher costs during the transition, there is no consensus on how to measure results, and financing, training and market rewards lag well behind farmers’ interest. A shared obligation is what can turn these isolated successes into lasting change.

This is not a case for religious agricultural policy, which would be unworkable in a pluralistic world. Smallholders are not waiting for a new theology. They need capital, training and markets. But the case for providing that support may rest more persuasively on the old idea of shared stewardship than on another spreadsheet of carbon calculations.

The next great agricultural transformation may begin not on the world’s largest farms but on hundreds of millions of its smallest. Given the means, smallholders may help determine whether the next 25 years of food production heal the planet or finish degrading it.

Hugh Locke is president of the Impact Farming Foundation and author of Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation (George Ronald Publisher, 2026).

IPS UN Bureau

Rob Jetten, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, addresses the High-level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition on September 23. Credit: UN Photo/Laura Jarriel

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 29 2026 (IPS)

The United Nations 2026 Climate Summit addressed critical strategies to mitigate the compounding impacts of the climate crisis and accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The summit brought together civil society actors, climate scientists, major energy producers and consumers, development experts, and world leaders on September 23 as part of the High-Level Week of the 81st session of the General Assembly (UNGA 81).

“The world is crying out for climate justice in mitigation, adaptation, and finance. We must answer that call with action, and we don’t have a moment to lose,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks. “But emissions are still rising when they must plummet, and fossil fuel expansion continues, defying science, economics, and common sense.”

“We have seen our fossil fuel dependence wreak havoc, driving up costs, draining budgets, squeezing households, and leaving countries at the mercy of conflicts and decisions far beyond their borders. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies are banking windfall profits while everyday people foot the bill. Doubling down on oil and gas will only lock in vulnerability for decades,” Guterres added.

Nearly a decade after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the summit comes as climate experts warn of a dangerous new phase in the global climate crisis. New findings project it is virtually “inevitable” that global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels within the next ten years.

This overshoot presents widespread, multifaceted risks—from extreme weather patterns to escalating public health emergencies. Intensifying heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods continue to cause millions of deaths annually, drive mass displacement, and destroy critical infrastructure, particularly in low-lying coastal regions.

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman of Bangladesh—one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions—warned the General Assembly that up to 18 percent of the country’s coastal land could be entirely submerged by rising seas, endangering the security and livelihoods of tens of millions. President Naiqama Lalabalavu of Fiji also emphasized that over half of his country’s population lives within a kilometer of the shore, leaving communities at a significant risk of being exposed to natural disasters. He further noted that the stock of fish available to each Fijian is estimated to decline by nearly 25 percent by 2050, threatening widespread food insecurity across the region.

The compounding impact of these disasters is also linked to depressed crop yields—which significantly impact food insecurity, accelerate biodiversity loss, and cause widespread disease outbreaks. Higher temperatures directly drive the spread of vector-borne illnesses, while rising sea levels and flooding exacerbate waterborne diseases. As a result, countries worldwide continue to sustain massive economic and human costs while aid organizations and health sectors struggle to keep up with the influx of needs.

Tarique Rahman, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, addresses the High-level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition. Credit: UN Photo/Laura Jarriel

“We just lived through the hottest July and August on record. Global sea surface temperatures are at a record high, and the worst is yet to come,” said Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “We enter a dangerous terrain where we’re likely to cross a number of tipping point systems that not only regulate the stability of the climate system, but also fundamentally determine life support for human development.”

Numerous speakers also underscored the severity of an immensely powerful “Super El Niño” rapidly forming in the Pacific Ocean, which WMO has described as potentially the strongest in at least a millennium. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center indicate a 90 percent chance that this El Niño will mark one of the most extreme weather events of the 2026-2027 winter.

Saulo warned that the global impacts of the impending El Niño will be massive and long-lasting and will cause 2026 to become the hottest year on record. Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, told the General Assembly that damages in Africa alone could exceed USD 20 billion, with comparable losses projected across other highly climate-vulnerable regions.

The summit sets new goals for the international community: to return global temperatures to below 1.5°C as quickly as possible, limit the severity and duration of ongoing impacts from the overshoot, and facilitate the global transition to renewable energy. Guterres warned that the current generation sits at a critical turning point—it is the first to possess the tools to end the climate crisis and the last with the opportunity to avert a “climate catastrophe.”

The main pathways for climate action highlighted during the summit included increased intergovernmental cooperation, sustained investment in climate adaptation and resilience monitoring systems, and wider-scale deployment of renewable energy. In recent years, renewables have become significantly cheaper than traditional fossil fuels—such as coal, oil, and natural gas—while generating far lower emissions, facilitating sustainable development, and potentially averting hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related losses worldwide.

While countries representing roughly 90 percent of all global emissions have submitted updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—signaling widespread political commitment to the Paris Agreement in the midst of heightened geopolitical tensions—current NDCs are projected to continue to fall short of the emission reductions required to prevent an overshoot of the 1.5°C target.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions and also founder of Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies, told the General Assembly that current financial contributions from the international community are insufficient, warning that these gaps in funding “can mean the difference between life and death.”

“More countries recognize that clean energy is essential to their security and economic stability. At the same time, while there’s still not enough climate funding going to developing countries, the amount has more than doubled since the Paris Agreement took effect,” said Bloomberg. “Now, we all know that’s not enough. Every day brings new evidence of the worsening harms of climate change.”

“No place on Earth is safe from climate change. Countries need more investment in resilient measures that protect people and in modern connected grids that will support the waves of clean energy installation. Both will require more of the kind of collaboration that has enabled progress over the past decade across government and business, philanthropy, nonprofits, and community leaders.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 
CIVICUS discusses the role of art in climate and rights struggles in the Brazilian Amazon with Tom Wheeler, executive director and co-founder of Treesistance. Treesistance is a platform operated by the Netherlands-based Sinchi Foundation that partners with Indigenous communities across four Brazilian states on cultural preservation and forest protection.

Tom Wheeler

How did art become the centre of a forest protection initiative?

Sinchi, the foundation behind Treesistance, was set up in 2016 as a cultural organisation. I believed we needed a societal or spiritual shift, so in our first years we ran festivals, film screenings, galleries, music events and debates, and built art and documentary projects with Indigenous communities across six continents.

At some point I went through a bit of a crisis, questioning what real impact this work was having. Then I met Vandria Borari, a brilliant Indigenous lawyer and celebrated ceramic artist from western Pará, a state in the Brazilian Amazon. She introduced me to the Tapajós and Arapiuns Indigenous Council, an association that represents 14 Indigenous groups in the Lower Tapajós region. In 2021, our focus shifted to the Amazon, and in 2023, together with our Indigenous partners, we co-created Treesistance as a platform built around four pillars: access to justice, communications, renewable energy and sustainable economic development.

The access to justice work is what we’re best known for. We support Forest Guardians, community-led groups that patrol and defend Indigenous territories against illegal logging and other threats, and we help build strong relationships between the territories and Brazil’s Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has a constitutional mandate to defend Indigenous rights.

That shift toward tangible, on-the-ground impact didn’t push art aside. If anything, it made clear how essential it was. Art isn’t a side product or a tool for us. It’s central to the community aspect of this work, to participation and authenticity, and to what the wider decolonial tradition is trying to achieve, of giving voice to communities and centring them in their own stories. Everything we do is co-created, but it’s led by our Indigenous partners. This carries multiple meanings for them, not least the pride of building something of their own from the ground up.

What’s the Tales of Resistance project?

Tales of Resistance is led on the ground by Vivi Borari, a talented young Indigenous woman. The idea was to build an archive, first and foremost for Indigenous communities’ use and records, telling the stories of the Majés and Pajés – plant healers, shamans and spiritual guides within these territories – from the inside out.

The project is about telling their origin stories, how they work within the community, what their roles and responsibilities are and the messages they carry from the spirits to the world. Once those stories exist on the communities’ terms, and with their consent, they can also travel further, which is why we’re now developing them into an exhibition. That kind of storytelling matters because one of the biggest challenges impact organisations face is talking only to people who already agree with them and failing to reach beyond that circle. Art and storytelling are how you break through.

We also took a deliberately different approach to how these stories are gathered. Turning up with a camera and asking people to explain their culture on the spot is a very western way of working. Just imagine how strange it would feel if someone did that to you. So we don’t do that. For us, everything starts as an audio recording while we are sitting together, having tea, walking in the forest, just talking about people’s experiences. Many of these stories would simply never be told in front of a camera. Only afterwards do we do a photo shoot, and that’s when we layer the audio and images together.

What films have you made, and what impact have they had?

Two years ago, we made a short film, Curupira, sharing the story of one of the forest’s spirits as told by one of the communities we work with. It was nominated for awards at film festivals around the world. It’s a tangible example of what storytelling can do for us. It brought in new interest, funders, partners and collaborators, people who wouldn’t otherwise have found their way to this work.

In 2026, we released another short film, Surara – Spirit of Resistance, directed by Lea Hejn, which won the Guardians in Action category at the Santiago Wild Film Festival in Chile. It includes footage from patrols led by Chief Dadá Borari, head of our Forest Guardian programme.

What changes when communities see themselves represented, and why do you call this resistance rather than activism?

The cultural scene, in the global south as much as the global north, is still working through questions of representation, making sure people see the diversity of their context reflected on screen. As Vivi has said, our biggest impact comes when Indigenous people see themselves and their reality reflected. This changes their self-perception. They no longer see themselves as victims but as people with agency, as fighters. That’s a qualitative impact that’s genuinely hard to put into a single sentence or measure in the way we measure hectares protected. But it’s real, and it’s the storytelling and narration that make it happen.

That’s also why we don’t use the word ‘activism’ much. It’s a strange word, a badge of honour to some people, something to avoid for others, and I think it’s fundamentally a western construct. There shouldn’t be anything activist about wanting to protect the health of the planet or stand up for human rights. That should be a key component of being a good person.

For our Indigenous partners, the stakes are different, though. For them, this work is intrinsic to survival, both literally, given the violence they face from illegal and aggressive forces, and culturally, in the sense of keeping traditions such as their graphic art and oral storytelling alive.

‘Resistência’ is the word I hear most often within Indigenous communities, whether people are talking about protecting their culture or land. It’s not a one-off response to a single government or form of exploitation, but something long-term and intergenerational, and like any form of resistance, the energy behind it runs low if it isn’t renewed. Art is one of the ways that energy gets renewed, generation after generation. That’s why we called the storytelling project Tales of Resistance and the wider platform Treesistance.

What other art initiatives do you run?

Storytelling extends into our product collaborations with local Indigenous artists, who create things such as clothing and notebooks. One example is Guardian of Nature, a T-shirt based on the Guardians’ uniform design. Buying one pays for a uniform for a Forest Guardian on the ground.

We’ve also launched a drink called Purpose, now going into restaurants in the Netherlands. A portion of the proceeds from every bottle sold supports our Forest Guardian projects. The brand itself is built around storytelling. It’s about people identifying their own sense of purpose in the world. So it’s art, but commercially driven, aimed at creating impact on the ground.

We held an open art and design competition for Indigenous artists from the 14 ethnic groups or nations of the Tapajós, focused on expressing their culture and relationship with nature. It brought the artists local and regional recognition through an event where the Indigenous Council, artists and other partners came together to celebrate the work.

How do you avoid the exploitative imagery typical of development fundraising?

Traditional development fundraising tends to rely on a particular kind of emotional imagery – a poor person, a hungry child, an old man in need – because that’s what drives donations from the kind of donor it targets. We deliberately avoid that.

There’s a well-known quote, often attributed to the Aboriginal Australian academic Lilla Watson, although she credits it to a collective of Aboriginal activists, that says, ‘If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together’.

None of the communities we work with are looking for charity. The role they play in protecting the Earth and their culture has real value in itself and, in my opinion, we need their wisdom more than they need us. We never describe ourselves as the communities’ funder. We’re a partner. When we help raise money, we’re clear that it was never ours to begin with. If it comes with requirements attached, the conversation is always about how we meet them together rather than about us imposing them. That’s the same principle whether we’re talking about a grant, a story or art. It has to build something the community owns, not something we extract.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Moderator Arif Ullah of Anthropocene Alliance joins LaTricea Adams of Young, Gifted, and Green; Dionne Delli-Gatti of Continuum Strategies; and Dr. Katlyn Turner of CU Boulder Information Science and KTLN Consulting to discuss AI’s environmental justice impacts and how frontline communities can maintain agency as data center development expands. Credit: Pillar Projects / Grayson Wise

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2026 (IPS)

On September 21, Frontline Resource Institute (FRI) hosted its Climate Justice Hub at Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York City under the theme “Building a Stronger Climate Coalition.”

As part of Climate Week, and coinciding with the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, the event united advocates, researchers, policymakers, and frontline leaders to address the intensifying threat of climate change to global public health, while highlighting the need for stricter guardrails on artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, particularly in their impacts on frontline communities.

Arif Ullah, Executive Director of Anthropocene Alliance (A2) and a moderator at the event, referenced Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by journalist Karen Hao, noting her warning that AI functions as a “new form of colonialism.” Ullah emphasized that AI’s impacts on frontline communities and their environments is multifaceted and far-reaching, requiring far more robust physical infrastructure to be sustainable.

“In July, nearly 1,400 tech company employees signed an open letter urging the [U.S.] government to regulate AI. Recently, an Anthropic researcher quit his job warning that the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” said Ullah. “When you consider the many ways in which [resources are] extracted, it’s hard to disagree. Hyperscale data centers are among the ways it’s most extracted, not to mention destructive. We are seeing them proliferate, unchecked and unregulated across the country.”

Numerous speakers at the event underscored that natural resources are routinely extracted from frontline communities with little regard for public health or the stability of local ecosystems. To meet the rapidly growing demands for continuous power, data centers around the world have increasingly implemented methane gas turbines. These measures have led to a surge in toxic chemical emissions—such as formaldehyde and benzene—driving widespread air and water pollution while consuming vast amounts of water.

Sarah Vogel, Senior Vice President of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and another moderator of the event, warned that extreme weather patterns—including intense heatwaves, prolonged flooding, destructive wildfires, degraded air and water quality, and the spread of infectious diseases—are among the most alarming and common consequences of AI-exacerbated climate change.

She emphasized that these impacts present heightened risks of lung cancer, heart disease, and strokes, particularly for frontline communities. Young people are uniquely vulnerable, as their developing bodies face continuous strain from pollutants without the opportunity to grow up in healthy environments. Those with pre-existing conditions also face a heightened risk of exacerbated health outcomes.

“For communities in this country and around the world who have experienced the legacy and ongoing impacts of environmental injustices, climate change and the related pollution is a threat magnifier,” said Vogel. “We know that when our health is impaired, it’s like a domino effect. Everything is impacted. Our ability to work, our ability to take care of children, the costs associated with it. The ability to just enjoy our lives. That is what we mean when we say that the climate crisis is a health crisis”

It is these frontline communities, oftentimes primarily composed of people of color, that are entrenched in severe environmental degradation and pushed further into poverty while others reap the financial benefits. Bearing the brunt of extreme pollution, these communities often lack the healthcare infrastructure required to withstand such environmental shocks.

LaTricea Adams, Founder, CEO, and President of Young, Gifted, and Green, noted that frontline communities are often left ill-equipped to adapt to AI-driven climate shocks, describing it as a “point of reckoning.” She emphasized that many residents are often unaware that they are on the frontlines of environmental degradation, going a “significant amount of time” without understanding the full extent of how these developments directly impact their lives.

“We as a collective are still not taking public health seriously. That also has an economic implication,” said Adams. “While you may bring in millions of dollars, if people are consistently sick, does that not have an impact on healthcare, which we know is lacking in our country and in our society?”

“What you’re not gonna do is come into our community and give us nothing but pollution while we remain in poverty. But at the same time, we do have to make sure that we protect the people that have been neglected for centuries in disinvestment.”

Several panelists underscored the importance of centering frontline communities in AI reform, with cooperation between governments, community leaders, corporations, and the health sector imperative in preventing harm and establishing sustainable practices that can uplift these communities. Vogel noted that in order to build healthy and resilient communities, approaches in AI regulation must prioritize health and equity to effectively minimize risks.

Panelist Ali Abazeed, Chief Public Health Officer and Director for the city of Detroit warned that the international community must not become “sophisticated witnesses” to preventable harm, noting that progress hinges on empowering communities and providing them with the data that affects their lives.

“Public health doesn’t happen inside an office. Comfort is comfortable. The ivory tower—the research generated there is hugely important but it has to roll out to the communities,” said Abazeed, emphasizing that action is critically important amidst widespread cuts to funding for research and potential hostile takeovers of national institutes for health.

“Speaking as a government official, we need to recognize that the work that we do and the powers that we have can help uplift and elevate communities. The charge is to be outside, to be in the clinic lobby for public health, in the church basement, for us to be meeting the fence-line communities.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

After decades in which the high seas were too often treated as a distant frontier—vast, ownerless and beyond meaningful protection—the High Seas Treaty entered into force on 17 January 2026.

It was a landmark achievement for international cooperation and a reminder that, even in an increasingly divided world, nations can still come together in defence of the common good. But celebration must not be confused with protection. A treaty on paper will not restore depleted marine life. It will not prevent harmful activity and it will not ensure that the benefits of ocean science are shared fairly. Nor will it secure a healthy ocean for future generations unless the international community gives it the resources, institutions, scientific capacity and political courage necessary to succeed. That is the real test now before us.

The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, also known as the High Seas Treaty, creates a framework for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. It addresses four essential areas: the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from marine genetic resources; marine protected areas and other area-based management tools; environmental impact assessments; and the capacity-building and transfer of marine technology. These areas will secure the future of the global ocean—and, by extension, the future of every nation whose climate, food security, economy and heritage depend upon it.

For small island developing states, it is our climate regulator, our food source, our economic space, our history and our future. We do not look at the sea as a faraway expanse beyond our borders. We live with it every day. We prosper or suffer according to its health.

During my years as President of Seychelles, this understanding shaped my conviction that the ocean had to be placed at the centre of national development. Seychelles chose to pursue a blue-economy vision at a time when the phrase was less familiar than it is today. We worked to protect large areas of our maritime space, advanced marine spatial planning, and explored innovative approaches to ocean finance, including debt-for-nature arrangements and the blue bond.

Our actions were not driven by the illusion that a small island nation could fix a global crisis single-handedly. Instead, we acted out of a core conviction: true leadership belongs to more than just the largest landmasses, the richest economies, or the most dominant militaries. While we are a small island state in land, we are a vast ocean nation. We possess a wealth of experience, strategic maritime vision, and deep resolve. It is this exact spirit—proving that stewardship is measured by commitment rather than geographic size—that must anchor and define the High Seas Treaty.

The treaty rightly recognises the special circumstances of developing states, including small island developing states and coastal African states. It acknowledges that access to data, research, equipment, technical knowledge, monitoring systems and trained people is essential if all countries are to participate meaningfully in ocean governance. However, this principle must now be honored in practice. Too often, developing countries are invited to global negotiations only to discover that the real advantages remain concentrated elsewhere: locked away in distant laboratories, research vessels, satellites, and data systems. If the benefits arising from marine genetic resources are to be genuinely shared, then access to the knowledge and tools required to understand and use those resources must also be shared. The ocean cannot become another arena in which wealthier nations draw the greatest benefit while poorer and more vulnerable countries are asked merely to endorse the rules.

The first Conference of the Parties for the High Seas Treaty, scheduled to take place in early January 2027, will be a critical moment. It must not become a narrow exercise in procedure or a meeting dominated by those already best equipped to influence outcomes. It should establish an implementation culture based on ambition, inclusion and urgency. It must ensure that the financial mechanism is strong enough to support developing countries, that scientific cooperation is meaningful, and that capacity-building is not reduced to occasional workshops or vague promises. The treaty’s decision-making body is expected to convene within its first year in force, making the coming months decisive for how this new era of ocean governance is shaped.

There is another important lesson here. The world has too often separated environmental protection from development, as though nations must choose between conserving nature and improving the lives of their people. For island states, this is a false choice. A healthy ocean is development. It supports fisheries and livelihoods. It protects coastlines. It regulates climate. It sustains tourism, culture and community. It offers scientific discoveries that may help humanity confront disease, food insecurity and environmental change. To protect the ocean is not to turn away from progress. It is to redefine progress so that it can endure.

This is why the High Seas Treaty matters so deeply. It offers a chance to move beyond a culture of reaction—responding only after a fishery declines, a species disappears, a reef bleaches or an ecosystem is damaged beyond repair. It gives the international community an opportunity to act with greater foresight: to assess environmental risks before they are allowed to grow, to establish protected areas before the last refuge is lost, and to place stewardship alongside opportunity. But no agreement, however historic, can substitute for political will.

The treaty will need champions: governments willing to invest in its success; scientists willing to share knowledge; institutions prepared to support fair access; civil society determined to hold leaders accountable; and young people who refuse to accept that the ocean’s future should be decided without them. Seychelles has long believed that the world must see the ocean not as a boundary between nations, but as the great connector of humanity. That belief is even more urgent today.

The high seas belong to no single country and its condition affects us all. The High Seas Treaty is therefore more than a legal instrument. It is a test of whether multilateralism can still respond to the challenges that no nation can solve alone.

The ocean has a law and now the world must give it life.

James Alix Michel, is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles

IPS UN Bureau

Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples protest exclusion and lack of recognition at the UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Credit: Lucas Wasson for Rights and Resources Initiative

By Bayarsaikhan Namsrai, Gregoria Jimenez Amaya, Isabel Davila Pereira and Stephen Basele
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia, Sep 23 2026 (IPS)

Rightsholders came to Ulaanbaatar from across the world, carrying declarations, demands and years of experience defending the lands on which their communities depend. Indigenous Peoples, local communities, Afro-descendant Peoples, women and youth were equally clear about what they needed from COP17. But being in the room is not the same as having power in the room.

In a year when the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists and the three Rio Conventions were supposed to create momentum for rights, recognition and implementation, the negotiations showed how quickly those gains can be diluted when the people concerned are not able to shape the language that governs their lands.

What happened in Ulaanbaatar should concern anyone advancing land restoration, climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. These cannot succeed while the rights of the people who govern these landscapes remain negotiable.

Ahead of COP17, the demands were clear: 2026 could not be a symbolic year. It had to be a year when secure and customary tenure for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, pastoralists, Afro-descendant Peoples, women and youth was translated into real protections and implementation across the Rio Conventions.

Pastoralists, Mobile Peoples, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities are proven leaders in land stewardship, biodiversity conservation and climate resilience. Achieving global restoration goals requires recognizing their rights, knowledge and leadership.

Secure and flexible tenure and mobility rights were an urgent ask in the context of the IYRP. RRI’s legal analysis of seven countries found that only Nepal and Niger recognize pastoralists as distinct rightsholders and only Niger considers mobility as a fundamental right. Even where rights exist on paper, they routinely fail against agricultural encroachment, mining, conservation expansion and green energy projects. Tenure should not be secondary to these initiatives, but a pre-condition before any projects are attempted in community lands.

Communities requested land and customary governance rights as a formal and permanent agenda item following past land tenure decisions, with customary institutions recognized as implementing bodies rather than consulted stakeholders and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as a precondition for any Land Degradation Neutrality action.

Finance is not a technical question. It is a question of power. At a COP supposedly focused on implementation, it should have been a central matter that communities cannot implement priorities they did not define, using resources they do not control. Yet too much climate, biodiversity and land finance still travels through institutions far removed from the communities whose territories generate environmental benefits.

For communities, direct and flexible finance is about more than getting money to the last mile. It is about trusting organizations and customary institutions to decide what resilience, restoration and development mean in their own territories.

Rightsholders were ready to advance their distinct rights during COP17. The presence of pastoralists at COP17 was significant, but presence alone does not translate into influence. Pastoralists arrived organized, with a global declaration and clear demands, yet the experience of the negotiations showed that meaningful participation requires more than being present in the conference halls. It requires the knowledge, resources, relationships and sustained capacity to follow negotiating texts, understand procedures, build alliances and influence language as decisions are being shaped.

On Land and People Day, the Indigenous Peoples Caucus delivered the Sacred Lands Declaration directly to the UNCCD Executive Secretary, demanding recognition grounded in self-determination, a permanent seat on the Committee on Science and Technology, and a dedicated fund for Indigenous-led restoration.

The local communities caucus asked for institutional status equal to the Indigenous Peoples’, Gender and Youth Caucuses rather than as a facilitative mechanism sidelined when convenient, plus a self-determined representation model and sustained funding for its operation.

Afro-descendant Peoples asked for what the other two Rio Conventions have already conceded: to be named. Afro-descendant Peoples across Latin America and the Caribbean steward territories degraded or acutely at risk — drylands, deforested frontiers, dry forests, riverine and coastal lands. They asked the UNCCD to open an Afro-descendant desertification agenda for the first time.

Women’s demands cut across all of this. Parties have built agreed gender language across three COPs. The ask was that it hold and be implemented.

For youth, being called “the future” has become another way of postponing their participation in the present. Young rightsholders are already living the consequences of drought, shrinking mobility, changing economies and pressures on their territories. They are not waiting to inherit these challenges. What they need is more than a voice now, it is representation, resources and authority in the institutions making decisions about their future. Their minimum requests included recognition as drivers of present-day adaptation, a permanent space within UNCCD processes, culturally appropriate education, and direct financing for youth-led organizations.

How the Negotiations Went

Based on prior COP decisions, COP17 should have been the continuation of a road towards implementation. Instead, the days in Ulaanbaatar became much more focused on protecting past progress rather than operationalizing it.

The institutional failures began on day one. At the opening plenary on 17 August, only two State Parties objected to agenda items, yet no vote was held and instead the presidency provisionally adopted the agenda. Future Strategic Framework, synergies with other conventions, gender, and participation of civil society were all deferred pending consultation. The COP closed with no decision at all on civil society participation, the Riyadh mandate to bring the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus and the Local Communities’ Caucus to full Terms of Reference under Decision 5/COP.16 was pushed to COP18, and Rio synergies were removed from all decisions. Gender never reached the negotiation floor; instead, a quiet Gender Caucus convened in Plenary as the agenda block was sustained.

Still, IYRP advocacy proved successful to some extent. Parties agreed to recognize the critical role of pastoralists as stewards of rangeland ecosystems, including the importance of transboundary mobility. However, compromise language was adopted, replacing “traditional knowledge” with “knowledge accumulated by pastoralists” in order to remove wording related to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

This distinction matters. Pastoralist knowledge is not simply a body of information accumulated over time; it is embedded in living institutions, relationships, territories and systems of customary governance. When knowledge is separated from the peoples and institutions that hold and transmit it, it becomes a technical resource while the rights and authority of its holders remain unrecognized. Draft decisions on land tenure and sand and dust storms also advanced, but only by leaving the naming of rightsholders behind. The lack of language on Indigenous Peoples and local communities was one of the biggest gaps. Many negotiators backed Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights in plenary, but behind closed doors, agreed to language so general it protects no one in particular. Language proposed replacing references to Indigenous Peoples with “common places” or “common people.” In the land tenure text, “affected areas” was pushed toward “common areas,” a phrase with no grounding in any multilateral mechanism and no obligations attached.

This dilution of language is particularly consequential as pressure on rangelands grows from competing global agendas. Rangelands are increasingly being presented as spaces for carbon sequestration, renewable energy, conservation and large-scale restoration, often without adequately recognizing the pastoralists who already govern and steward these landscapes.

And this is where the politics of rangelands becomes unavoidable.

Rangelands are increasingly being seen as spaces for carbon, renewable energy, conservation and large-scale restoration. The danger is that landscapes already governed and stewarded by pastoralists begin to be treated as empty spaces available for solving someone else’s global environmental problem.

A green transition cannot become a new form of land dispossession.

If pastoralists are displaced in the name of renewable energy, excluded in the name of conservation, or turned into carbon credits in the name of climate action, then changing the colour of development does not change its underlying politics.

Climate, biodiversity and land restoration objectives must not be pursued by treating pastoralist territories as empty spaces or global environmental infrastructure while sidelining the people whose livelihoods, cultures and institutions are rooted in them.

The same principle applies to emerging carbon and other environmental markets. Pastoralist rangelands cannot be reduced to carbon sinks whose value is defined externally while the cumulative ecological, economic and cultural value of pastoralism remains invisible. Any financing or market mechanism operating in these territories must begin with secure tenure, meaningful participation, Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and fair recognition of the rights and contributions of pastoralist communities.

Right through the final day, negotiators discussed whether to reference synergies among the Rio Conventions, and whether to include gender at all. These questions were either resolved by adopting ambiguous and broad language that betrays the protection from past COP decisions or by simply delaying any decisions to COP18.

Across every draft negotiating text currently available, rangelands, drought, sand and dust storms, land tenure, Afro-descendant Peoples do not appear at all. Not contested and diluted; simply absent. On the year of the three Rio Conventions, this demonstrates how UNCCD is lagging. CBD Decision 16/6 made the Convention on Biological Diversity the first Rio Convention to name them explicitly and at UNFCCC COP30 they appeared in core negotiating text. The bridge that could have carried that recognition into the UNCCD was the synergies item blocked on day one. These synergies are urgent to deal with the intersections across climate, land degradation and biodiversity conservation.

When it came to drought, the COP also fell short. Decision ICCD/COP(17)/L.15 runs to four operative paragraphs: continue discussions at COP18 with a view to adopting a decision on proactive drought management; make drought a stand-alone agenda item; ask the secretariat and Global Mechanism to keep supporting Parties; and report back. After deferring at COP16 and again here, the working group toward a binding instrument did not materialize; the next window is 2028. In the current text, Indigenous Peoples and local communities appear as people affected by drought and consulted, rather than as rightsholders.

COP17 presented an unprecedented situation in which a small number of Parties blocked key issues from meaningful consideration. There is no Land Degradation Neutrality without human rights, no resilience without gender equality, no sustainable land governance without Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities.

COP17 also taught us something uncomfortable about participation. It is possible to be visible everywhere at a COP and still have very little influence over what finally enters the negotiating text.

Influence requires preparation. It requires people who understand the Convention, know the procedures, follow the text, build relationships with negotiators, organize across constituencies and remain engaged long after the cameras leave. Pastoralist movements have strong knowledge of their lands and livelihoods. What they need now is equal investment in the political and technical capacity required to defend that knowledge and those rights in global decision-making spaces.

If pastoralists want to shape the next COP, they cannot only prepare declarations. They must prepare negotiators.

What Happens Next

The answer cannot be another declaration.

The remaining COPs of 2026 must turn recognition into implementation. That means three things: name the peoples whose rights are at stake; put resources directly into the hands of their organizations and institutions; and give them meaningful authority over the decisions affecting their territories.

At CBD COP17 and UNFCCC COP31, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities must be recognized as rights-holders and implementing partners, not folded into generic “vulnerable groups” language. At UNCCD COP18, the gains made on pastoralists, tenure and customary governance must not be allowed to disappear into vague language.

But the responsibility does not rest with the conventions alone. Pastoralist movements must also build the capacity to influence these processes. The period between COPs must be used to coordinate positions, prepare negotiators, track decisions and negotiating texts, build alliances across the Rio Conventions and engage governments between sessions. Pastoralist organizations need investment not only to attend COPs, but to understand and shape what happens inside them.

COP18 must deliver the adoption of Terms of Reference for the Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ Caucuses, restore gender and synergies to the agenda, open an Afro-descendant desertification agenda, advance a drought decision with the communities who live its consequences first, and restore the full recognition of traditional knowledge.

Vague language does not merely fail to establish obligations. It blurs the content of rights and leaves earned recognition in a regression limbo.

Naming peoples is the beginning of recognition, not the end of it. Recognition must lead to rights, rights must be backed by institutions and finance, and those institutions must have the authority to shape the decisions that affect their territories.

The peoples who shepherd the vast majority of the world’s lands do not need another symbolic year. They need their names written into the decisions, and their voices, institutions and authority protected long after the COP is over.

Bayarsaikhan Namsrai (Steps Without Borders), Gregoria Jimenez Amaya (CITAFRO/ODECO), Isabel Davila Pereira (Rights and Resources Initiative), Stephen Basele (Pastoralist Goals Foundation)

IPS UN Bureau

Closing plenary of the recent Kunming Dialogue. Credit: ENB-IISD/Anastasia Rodopoulou

By Stella Paul
KUNMING, China, Sep 17 2026 (IPS)

The world may have enough money to protect nature. The bigger problem, according to the head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is that too much of it is still being spent on activities that destroy it.

With just four years left to meet the world’s 2030 biodiversity goals, Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the CBD, said governments must urgently change where money flows if they are to slow the loss of nature.

Her warning comes just weeks before governments meet in Yerevan, Armenia, for COP17, the UN biodiversity conference scheduled for October 19-30.

Speaking at a press conference organised by the CBD Secretariat on September 11 – after the three-day Kunming Dialogue, Schomaker said governments need to redirect financial flows and reform incentives that encourage activities harmful to nature. Without such changes, she warned, progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) will remain too slow.

What’s Slowing Biodiversity Action?

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in Montreal in 2022, sets 23 targets for protecting and restoring biodiversity by 2030. Since its adoption, governments have been carrying out the first-ever global stocktake of how the framework is being implemented, examining progress across countries and individual targets.

The stocktake began after COP16 and is looking at the full picture of implementation, from the targets countries have set for themselves to the policies, plans, finance and other measures they are putting in place to achieve them. Its findings are being compiled in the forthcoming State of Biodiversity Action report, which will present the final global assessment at COP17.

The three-day Kunming Dialogue, held from Sept. 7 to 9, offered governments, scientists, Indigenous Peoples, youth representatives and civil society organisations an early look at the trends emerging from this stocktake. While more than 70 percent of countries have submitted national reports and over 90 percent have established biodiversity targets aligned with the global framework, the emerging picture is far less encouraging. Progress remains uneven, with implementation lagging behind the scale and pace needed to achieve the 23 targets by 2030. The emerging findings suggest that global efforts are not yet moving fast enough or at the scale needed to achieve the 23 targets by 2030. In other words, while countries have made progress in setting commitments, implementation remains well behind what is required.

“Progress is being made clearly, but it is uneven, and it is clearly also not at the pace and scale required,” Schomaker told IPS.

Gap Between Global Goals and National Action

One of the biggest problems is that biodiversity commitments have not yet been fully carried into national policies, budgets and economic decisions.

According to Schomaker, some of the largest gaps are in finance, resource mobilisation and efforts to bring biodiversity into the work of government ministries and economic sectors beyond the environment.

Jillian Campbell, Head of Planning, Monitoring and Knowledge at the CBD Secretariat, said the problem is not that countries have failed to set targets. Rather, there is often a gap between what was agreed globally and what countries have committed to doing at home.

“Most parties have set national targets covering almost every global target. However, the national targets often don’t cover the full extent of the global targets,” she told IPS.

As countries turned the global framework into their own national plans, some of its ambition was lost along the way. This is particularly visible in areas where action depends on ministries beyond the environment, including finance, agriculture, infrastructure and development.

That raises a bigger question — and one that is likely to be central at COP17: is the problem really a lack of money for biodiversity, or is it where existing money is going?

For Schomaker, the answer is clear.

“The biggest elephant in the room of all of that is the misalignment of financial systems,” she told IPS. “There is enough money around in the world economy. The question is, where does that money go?”

Money Flowing in the Wrong Direction

Governments, businesses and financial institutions continue to channel large amounts of money into activities that damage ecosystems, even as they commit themselves to protecting nature.

Changing that pattern, Schomaker said, should be one of the central priorities for COP17.

The discussions in Kunming highlighted a growing understanding that biodiversity loss is not caused only by what happens in forests, rivers and oceans. It is also shaped by decisions made in boardrooms, government ministries and financial institutions.

Participants pointed to subsidies, investments and other financial incentives that continue to make activities harmful to nature more attractive or profitable.

Asad Naqvi, Secretary of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation, said the answer to the biodiversity funding problem may therefore lie partly in changing how existing money is used rather than simply searching for new sources of funding.

He noted that governments are still spending large sums on incentives that undermine biodiversity, particularly through harmful subsidies in agriculture and fossil fuels. Redirecting those resources, he suggested, could help close financing gaps while addressing some of the root causes of nature loss.

Biodiversity Beyond Environment Policy

Finance, however, is only part of the challenge.

The Kunming Dialogue also highlighted the need for governments to treat biodiversity as an issue that cuts across the entire economy, rather than something that belongs mainly to environment ministries.

Agriculture, finance, infrastructure and development ministries all make decisions that can either protect or damage ecosystems. Unless biodiversity is considered in those decisions, governments may find themselves trying to repair environmental damage with one hand while creating more of it with the other.

That broader approach is expected to be an important part of the discussions at COP17.

For many observers, the significance of COP17 will depend on how governments respond to the findings of the State of Biodiversity Action report — and whether they can turn commitments into action faster.

The conference is expected to focus on speeding up implementation, closing finance gaps and tackling the targets where progress remains furthest behind.

As delegates prepare to meet in Yerevan, the debate is moving beyond whether governments support the global biodiversity framework.

With only four years left before the 2030 deadline, bringing finance into line with the needs of nature may become one of the defining tests of the global biodiversity agenda.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Indigenous Kakataibo patrol in the Yamino community forest. A new report titled Collective Power documents the deaths of people who stood against environmental destruction, land grabs, illegal logging, mining projects and other threats to their communities. Credit: Global Witness

By Umar Manzoor Shah
LONDON & SRINAGAR, India, Sep 16 2026 (IPS)

At least 124 land and environmental defenders were killed around the world in 2025 while protecting forests, rivers, farmland and Indigenous territories, according to a new report by Global Witness that warns violence against activists remains widespread even as recorded killings have declined from previous years.

The report, titled Collective Power, documents the deaths of people who stood against environmental destruction, land grabs, illegal logging, mining projects and other threats to their communities. It says the 124 killings recorded in 2025 bring the total number of land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared since Global Witness began tracking such cases in 2012 to 2,375.

While the number of killings fell from 142 deaths and four disappearances documented in 2024, Global Witness cautioned that the decline should not be viewed as evidence that defenders are becoming safer, and onimously, the killing and intimidation have serious consequences for the environment.

“Defenders are the world’s eyes and ears on the ground. It’s thanks to them that we know when ecosystems are being destroyed, where forests are being cleared or rivers polluted,” Toby Hill, land and environmental defenders investigator and lead author, said. “The violence that defenders face, including killings in the most extreme cases, reflects a much broader struggle over the world’s land and resources. But beyond these tragic stories, we can’t forget the thousands of defenders around the world who are working every day to protect their territories and cultures under increasing pressure.”

The report said, “Every one of these deaths represents an attempt, in the most brutal fashion, to impose a chilling effect on movements that resist environmental and human rights abuses. We remember the families, friends and communities who have been left devastated by each attack.”

Researchers argue that the real number of killings is likely much higher because many attacks occur in remote areas, conflict zones and countries where civil society groups face intimidation for reporting abuses. According to the report, difficulties in documenting cases are particularly severe in parts of Africa and Asia, as well as increasingly in Latin America.

The findings reveal a global struggle over land, natural resources and environmental protection, with Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers bearing the heaviest burden.

Indigenous women walk along a river in the Amazon rainforest. According to Global Witness, Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers accounted for nearly three-quarters of the land, and environmental defenders killed globally in 2025. The report highlights the growing risks faced by communities defending their lands, livelihoods and ecosystems from environmental destruction and resource exploitation. Credit: Global Witness

Nearly three-quarters of those killed in 2025 were Indigenous people or small-scale farmers defending their land rights and livelihoods. The report found that 47 victims were small-scale farmers and 44 were Indigenous people. Three victims were Afro-descendant defenders.

Among the dead were seven members of Indigenous guard systems, community-based groups that patrol and protect ancestral territories from illegal activities and outside encroachment. In five of those cases, researchers identified links to organised crime, highlighting what the report describes as a growing overlap between environmental conflicts and criminal networks.

Despite this, Indigenous people continue to defend their environments.

“Defending our territory is important to us as a community and as a people, and we’re proud to support the climate that we all depend on. In our culture, the work of defending our resources and territory is taught from an early age. But for this next generation coming up, the work is more dangerous than ever,” Segundo Ispón, commander of Peru’s Kakataibo Indigenous Guard, said.

Global Witness said the killings represent only the most visible form of repression. Beneath them lies what human rights groups call a “hidden iceberg” of threats that include criminal charges, surveillance, harassment, smear campaigns and online abuse.

“Increasingly, social media is weaponised to discredit and harass defenders, eroding public trust and isolating them from their communities,” the report noted.

The organisation suggested that some governments and powerful interests may be relying more on non-lethal forms of repression, which can silence opposition without attracting the international attention that often follows a murder.

The report also highlights a broader deterioration in civic freedoms. Of the 15 countries where killings were documented, 10 were categorised as “repressed” by the CIVICUS Monitor, a global tracker of civic freedoms. Nicaragua was listed in the most restrictive category, described as “closed”.

Asia emerged as one of the regions where environmental defenders face increasing pressure through legal and political means.

A major section of the report focuses on Indonesia, where Dayak Indigenous communities in West Kalimantan have resisted industrial expansion, land grabs and deforestation. According to Global Witness, community leaders and Indigenous defenders have faced criminalisation while attempting to protect forests and customary lands.

The report argues that such cases reflect a wider regional trend in which defenders are increasingly targeted through courts, police investigations and administrative actions rather than direct violence alone. It cites concerns raised by human rights organisations regarding the criminalisation of environmental activism across parts of Asia.

In the Philippines, environmental defenders Jhed Tamano and Jonila Castro are highlighted as examples of activists who continued their advocacy despite legal and political pressure. Their experiences are presented as part of a larger pattern in which defenders face reputational attacks and criminal allegations linked to their activism.

The report also examines Peru, where members of the Kakataibo Indigenous people have developed Indigenous guard systems to protect their territory from growing threats associated with organised crime and environmental exploitation. The movement is presented as an example of collective protection developed by communities that feel abandoned by state institutions.

Across Latin America, which has historically recorded some of the highest numbers of killings of environmental defenders, the report documents continuing violence, disappearances and intimidation.

It revisits the disappearance of Mexican defenders Ricardo Lagunes and Antonio Díaz, whose case has become emblematic of the dangers faced by people challenging powerful economic interests. Three years after their disappearance, United Nations experts were still calling for truth and justice.

The report also highlights the unresolved disappearance of Chilean Indigenous defender Julia Chuñil. According to Global Witness, her family and legal representatives have faced mounting pressure while continuing to seek answers.

“Despite this pressure, Julia’s family continues to fight for truth and justice,” the report said. “They are still searching for their mother, organising protests, pursuing legal challenges and bringing international attention to the case.”

In Nigeria, defenders protecting the Ekuri Forest in Cross River State continued to face intimidation, arrest and detention after speaking out against illegal logging. The report said community leaders were targeted following complaints linked to logging interests but were later released after intervention from environmental organisations and lawyers.

“The arrests were widely viewed as an attempt to silence efforts to defend tropical forests and community forest rights,” the report stated.

The gender dimension of environmental activism also features prominently in the findings. Of the 124 defenders whose deaths were verified in 2025, 109 were men, 14 were women and one was identified as non-binary. However, researchers stressed that women defenders often experience different forms of violence that are less visible but equally damaging.

The report cites data from the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders showing more than 30,000 non-lethal attacks against women defenders in Mexico and Central America between 2012 and 2023. These included harassment, threats, surveillance, psychological abuse and smear campaigns.

The report also expresses concern about the unprecedented fall in foreign aid seen in 2025 – driven by budget cuts by the governments of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and other traditional donors – impacting thousands of human rights organisations, drastically reducing the global pool of support to communities acting in the depths of rainforests and other secluded ecosystems.

“The effects of these budget cuts are not abstract. In Colombia, projects working to promote and protect human rights and support defenders have been hit by the sudden drop in foreign aid, particularly from the U.S. When foreign aid retreats, Indigenous Peoples and small-scale farmers can be left with fewer resources and less support as they defend the forests, rivers and other ecosystems that sustain their communities and help keep the global climate stable,” Juliana Vélez Echeverri, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said.

Global Witness says the solution requires more than investigations into individual killings. The organisation is calling for stronger legal protections for Indigenous peoples, recognition of land rights, accountability for corporations and criminal networks, and greater support for community-led protection systems.

The report argues that environmental defenders are not only protecting local communities but also safeguarding forests, biodiversity and ecosystems that are critical in the fight against climate change. Their work, researchers say, often benefits society far beyond the places where they live.

The publication opens with a dedication to those who continue that work despite the risks.

“This report is dedicated to all those individuals, communities and organisations bravely speaking out or taking action to defend their rights to land and a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” it says. “Last year, 124 people were murdered for doing this work.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

A delegate walking past a billboard at the Africa Food Systems Forum at Kigali Convention Centre in Rwanda's capital. Credit: Farai Shawn Matiashe/IPS

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
KIGALI, Sep 14 2026 (IPS)

When the African continent experiences erratic rains, crops fail, leaving millions of people facing hunger.

Approximately 95% of Africa’s arable land depends heavily on rainfall, which is vulnerable to climate shocks such as drought.

El Niño-induced drought expected to hit some parts of Africa, particularly southern Africa, is going to worsen the situation.

At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, governments and development partners are calling for more investment in irrigation systems to reduce dependence on rain-fed agriculture by farmers, including small holders who make up 80% of all farmers in sub-saharan Africa.

Building More Irrigation Systems

Only 5% of Africa’s arable land is under irrigation. Asia irrigates about 7 times more than Africa, as it holds about three-quarters of the entire world’s irrigated land.

“Some irrigation systems have been developed. The task now is to take it to scale,” said Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture, Senator Abubakar Kyari, at a side event organised by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). “The technology is there and the workforce is there. What we need is collective action.”

IWMI is a global research organisation addressing water challenges in developing countries, working with governments, civil society, and businesses.

When El Niño hit the southern Africa region in the 2023/2024 agriculture season, it triggered one of the driest mid-seasons in over 40 years. It devastated rain-fed maize production, leaving over 26 million people facing hunger in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia and Zambia.

These countries declared national drought disasters to mobilise resources from the public purse, private sector and humanitarian agencies.

In preparing for the next El Nino, Abubakar said agriculture cannot remain at the mercy of the seasons. He said Africa should sustainably manage and deploy its vast water schemes. “This is not a continent of scarcity but of strategic abundance,” he said. “Our task now is not to apportion blame but to break that cycle.”

Africa holds about 9% of the world’s renewable freshwater systems.

Abubakar proposed the adoption and operationalisation of the African Union Framework on Irrigation Development and Agricultural Water Management to enhance water control and increase farmer-led irrigation. This framework is a continental blueprint published in 2020 to boost food security, adapt to climate change, and modernise agriculture across member states.

Abubakar said there is a need to innovate financing to close the investment gap and to strengthen transboundary water appropriation. “We must move from sharing drops to sharing benefits. Establishment of enforceable cooperative frameworks. To scale up climate-smart irrigation and put farmers at the centre of irrigation development. Also to open opportunities for young people in irrigated value chains,” he said

“We must turn continental commitments into actionable delivery. We have articulated the future we want. We must translate that.”

Policy is key to enabling a working, favourable environment for increasing investment in the agriculture sector.

Speaking at the same event, Vincent Kabuti, Irrigation Secretary in the Ministry of Water, said governments should be able to put in place mechanisms for farmers to hold the government accountable.

He said large commercial irrigation systems are essential in complementing farmer-led irrigation systems.

“We have a lot of water, but it is the investment that we do not have,”

Preparing for the next El Niño

Southern Africa expects the next El Niño in the 2026/2027 agricultural season, according to scientists.

The weather phenomenon was officially declared on 11 June by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA confirmed that ocean temperatures in equatorial areas of the Pacific Ocean had remained more than 0.5 °C above average for several months.

El Niño occurs when trade winds in the Pacific reverse direction, causing warmer water to flow into central and eastern areas of the world’s largest ocean.

In Africa, it normally brings El contrasting weather extremes, causing severe droughts in southern Africa and heavy, flood-triggering rains across East Africa.

Drier conditions, which scientists are anticipating, are expected to threaten staple crop yields like maize in southern Africa. Reduced food security risks compounding pressure on food price inflation and acute malnutrition among children.

Abubakar said irrigation systems cushion farmers from droughts and boost food security, create jobs and boost the livelihoods of approximately 439 million Africans living in extreme poverty.

Tilahun Amede, a director of Climate Sustainable Productivity and Resilience at Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an institution focused on scaling agricultural innovations that help smallholder farmers towards increased incomes, better livelihoods, and improved food security, said countries must integrate water in every aspect of agriculture. “African governments must invest in water and irrigation systems,” he said.

“We also need to create a market for farmers to increase their incomes so that they can adopt irrigation systems.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Female Students learning wildlife tracking at a conservation leadership camp. Credit: Moreangels Mbizah

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Sep 9 2026 (IPS)

A 12-year-old male lion slipped out of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park one winter morning and killed a 7-year-old boy in a village it wandered into.

The boy, Elton, should have been safe within his village outside Zimbabwe’s largest national park, but a winter morning ended that safety. The lion cut short his life, pushing a grieving community into the centre of a contested frontline: conflict for space between humans and wildlife. The lion was put down.

“That day forever remains etched in my mind, and it’s one of the reasons that led me to form the Wildlife Conservation Action,” says zoologist Moreangels Mbizah, recalling how the morning of April 2014 when she found the lion had killed Elton changed her perspective about wildlife coexisting with people.

“I realised that protecting lions inside the park meant very little if we were not also protecting people living alongside them,” Mbizah said.

Charity Patron, HRH Princess Anne, presented Dr Moreangels Mbizah with a 2026 Whitley Award in April 2026 to expand a coexistence model of conservation in northern Zimbabwe. Credit: Whitley Fund for Nature

Conservation From Tragedy

Wildlife and communities living near or within conservation areas across Zimbabwe fight over habitat and resources.

In 2024, 49 people were killed by wild animals across the country; this number increased to 53 in 2025, according to the Ministry of Environment, Wildlife and Climate. Zimbabwe is currently developing a National Human-Wildlife Coexistence Strategy aimed at curbing human-wildlife conflict.

The country’s parks authority, ZimParks, recently released figures indicating that over the last decade over 12,000 incidents of human-wildlife conflict have been recorded. At that time 486 people were killed with 554 others injured, while more than 4,000 livestock were lost to wildlife attacks.

Human wildlife conflict hotspots in the country include Binga, Hwange, Chiredzi, Hurungwe, Mbire, Muzarabani, Nyaminyami, Chipinge, Gokwe North, Gokwe South, Tsholotsho, Bulilima and Kusile districts. Habitat encroachment, climate change, population growth and inadequate barriers between communities and wildlife have been blamed for the increase in human-wildlife conflict.

Wildlife Conservation Action works in the Nyaminyami and Binga districts, which are part of the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). They also work in Mbire district along the border with Mozambique and Mana Pools National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site with the only floodplain ecosystem left in the Middle Zambezi. The area which also forms part of the Zimbabwe-Mozambique-Zambia (ZIMOZA) TFCA is a human-wildlife conflict hotspot, especially for elephants and lions.

Over the years, villagers in Mbire District who have lost livestock to lions have fought back. Lions have been killed as communities defended themselves and their livestock.

Securing livestock, saving lions

A lion and lioness in the wild. Credit: Moreangels Mbizah

Losing a single cow to a lion is a loss of family income of an average three months in Mbire District. In general people earn an average monthly wage of $108, and a cow sells for an average of $300, said Mbizah, who is among the few Black African women to have founded a conservation organisation.

Many families keep livestock for income and food. For a farmer with just five cows, protecting the animals is also protecting lions – a paradox that got Mbizah thinking.

Mbizah – who, as part of her PhD studies, famously tracked “Cecil the Lion” before it was killed in 2015, sparking global criticism – has used community leadership and low-tech innovation of solar-powered “lion lights” and mobile cattle kraals to protect $2.3 million worth of local livestock.

She said the interventions promoted in the community to reduce human-wildlife conflict are non-lethal and climate smart, such as holistic livestock management, use of mobile bomas, beekeeping and chilli farming, and sustainable agriculture.

“Our programme has been successful because of our relationship with the community and engaging them as guardians for the environment. We looked at the traditional way of kraaling that people have been using for generations and how they can strengthen that so the livestock is protected overnight from lion attacks,” Mbizah said.

Her organisation has helped farmers build lion-proof bomas for their cattle and raised kraals for their goats. These kraaling methods have reduced lion attacks on livestock.

In addition, Community Guardians, whom Mbizah calls the bedrock of her organisation, have been recruited and trained on detecting lions before they attack. Young women and men use specialised equipment which alerts them to lion movements near the community and are able to move the predators away safely.

Ruth Kamuchato, from Mapini Village in Mbire District, says growing up seeing lions attacking livestock motivated her to train as a community guardian. She wanted to understand how it was possible to protect lions and livestock at the same time.

“I feel good about working as a community guardian, but it was difficult in the beginning to appreciate people and wildlife thriving together because of the fear of lions, which are dangerous animals,” said Kamuchato. “When lions kill livestock or threaten people, the first feeling is that animals are our enemy, but after training and working in conservation, I started seeing the bigger picture that lions are not bad – they are just trying to survive too.”

A community guardian installing a lion light monitoring unit. Credit: Moreangels Mbizah

Another Community Guardian, Knowledge Chiriga (31) from Nebiri Village Ward 7, in Nyaminyami District, says protecting lions was a solution to the human-wildlife conflict experienced in his village.

“I grew up in the Nebiri village, which is about 7 km from Matusadonha National Park, and have experienced a lot of human-wildlife conflict since my early childhood, and then I had no hope of finding a programme that would relieve the community from the challenge we had with lions,” Chiriga said, admitting he jumped at the opportunity to train as a community guardian under the Wildlife Conservation Action.

“Lions are part of our ecosystem and our heritage, so protecting them doesn’t mean ignoring danger, but finding ways to keep both people and lions safe,” Chiriga said. “Now I feel proud because I am helping my community to stay safe. With better safety measures we can live alongside lions.”

Lweetelelo Mugande (29) from Chitongo village, Ward 17 in Binga District, said it was difficult in the beginning for the community to accept her role in conserving lions, as some people asked why protect animals that hurt them.

“But over time, as we showed up during conflicts, we helped set up mobile bomas and explained how conservation can bring jobs and support; attitudes started to change,” she said.

“Now many community members call us when there’s a problem. They see that we are from the same village and that we have livestock and families here and that we are trying to find solutions together. Trust is growing, but we still have a lot of awareness work to do.”

Cattle inside a predator-proof mobile boma in Zimbabwe. Credit: Moreangels mbizah

Mbizah received the 2026 Whitley Award for her work in saving lions through a community-led model. The award, recognising conservation leaders across the world, will enable Mbizah to expand the coexistence model of conservation to other districts in the country.

“Local communities have a cultural connection to and respect for the wildlife, but that comes with risks, and this is where the challenge is,” Mbizah tells IPS. “If we can reduce these risks, people can tolerate the presence of wildlife in their communal land. Where there is conflict, people do not want lions because they impact their lives, livelihood and livestock.”

Lion populations in Africa are under threat. Over 90% of their historic range has been lost in recent years. The African lion (Panthera leo) is classified as a threatened species and listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

There has been a significant lion population decline of approximately 43% over the past 21 years with an estimated 25,000 individuals remaining in the wild in Africa. The loss of habitat, the decline of prey and human-wildlife conflict, where the lions have been killed in retaliation for livestock losses, are key drivers to the reduction in lion population.

Mbizah highlights the misconception that conservation is separate from development. Her work is at the intersection of conservation and community development.

“We help communities to protect wildlife by improving their livelihoods,” she explained. “If communities are doing well, they are more likely to be involved in conservation and to protect the wildlife around them. We cannot just protect the species without protecting the people that are also protecting these species.”

At a time when Africa’s lion population is threatened, Zimbabwe has maintained healthy populations thanks to its strong conservation programmes. Mbizah’s conservation approach is a model for protecting predators without impoverishing the people who live in its environment.

“Protecting lives and livelihoods ultimately protects lions too,” Mbizah said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Rodney Bay Marina, Saint Lucia. Rising seas are among the mounting risks for small island states as the world heads towards an expected overshoot of 1.5°C. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
CASTRIES, Saint Lucia, Sep 8 2026 (IPS)

The world is now expected to breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit that small island states have spent years defending as a threshold for survival.

For people in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean, the consequences will not begin only when islands disappear beneath the sea. They include saltwater intrusion into freshwater supplies and agricultural land, coral reef loss, more damaging coastal flooding and mounting pressure on already limited resources for recovery and adaptation.

That is the stark warning emerging from the United Nations Environment Programme’s Limiting Overshoot report, launched on September 2. The report examines a future in which average global temperatures rise beyond 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels before, potentially, being brought back down.

The report concludes that the world is now expected to cross the 1.5°C threshold. What is still uncertain is how far above it temperatures will rise, how long they will remain there and how quickly they can eventually be brought back down.

Dr Shobha Maharaj, a Caribbean scientist and one of the lead authors of the report’s Chapter Four, says the expected breach raises a new set of questions for small island states.

“For years, the goal was to avoid crossing 1.5°C. But this report now says very clearly that we are going to cross it,” she said. “The question now is how deep is this overshoot going to go? How long is it going to last? And how do we live through it while we work to bring temperatures back down to 1.5°C?”

No buffer

The Paris Agreement committed countries to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. Small island states were among the strongest advocates for the 1.5°C target, arguing that higher levels of warming would pose an existential threat.

“For small islands, it is because we live closest to the thresholds,” Maharaj said. “In a wealthy, temperate country, an additional half-degree of warming would still carry serious costs. But on a small island, it could determine whether a reef recovers or not, or whether an aquifer stays fresh or turns salty for good.”

“There is no higher ground to move to, no deep treasury to draw on and no second reef when one of them dies,” she added. There is no higher ground to move to, no deep treasury to draw on and no second reef when one of them dies.

The danger is not limited to dramatic disasters, she said. Habitability can erode quietly.

“Saltwater can contaminate groundwater and soil. A kitchen garden that has fed a family for generations may stop producing. High tides can reach roads, homes and public infrastructure even on clear days. When reefs die, communities lose not only fish and tourism income but also natural barriers that weaken waves before they reach the shore.”

“None of this requires an island to vanish,” Maharaj said. “Habitability begins to collapse first, quietly, through water, food and the loss of the everyday things that make a place home. By the time submergence becomes the headline, people have often already been forced to leave.”

The report warns that sea-level rise will continue for centuries and that falling global temperatures would not reverse all the damage accumulated during overshoot. Some ecosystem, biodiversity and glacier losses would persist, meaning a return to 1.5°C would not restore the world that existed before the threshold was crossed.

Small Islands, Different Realities

SIDS are often discussed as a single group, but Maharaj cautioned that their circumstances and options differ.

Pacific atoll states face acute threats because of their extremely low elevation and vulnerable freshwater lenses. Some Pacific islands are also experiencing land subsidence, compounding the effects of rising seas.

Several Caribbean states have higher terrain, but much of their population, infrastructure and economic activity is concentrated along narrow coastal areas. Indian Ocean states face their own combination of risks.

“What we share is a structural predicament, narrow room for retreat, limited finances and economies that are exposed to single shocks,” Maharaj said.

But she warned against transferring solutions indiscriminately between regions.

“The right response in Tuvalu, for example, is not automatically the right response in Barbados or the Maldives.”

Adaptation Buys Time, Not Immunity

For decades, adaptation has been presented as the principal defence for countries already living with climate impacts. But the UNEP report says many existing approaches were designed for gradual, one-directional warming, not temperatures that rise, plateau and may eventually decline.

Strategies fixed to one set of conditions could become ineffective or even increase vulnerability as conditions change. The report calls instead for adaptation that is flexible, forward-looking and capable of evolving throughout the different stages of overshoot.

“Adaptation buys time, not immunity,” Maharaj said.

She said the large gap between adaptation planning and implementation may provide a narrow opportunity to revise projects before they are built for conditions they can no longer withstand.

“We have a lot of plans, but many of them have not yet been implemented,” she said. “That gives us a window, although not a large one, to recalibrate those plans for a post-1.5°C world.”

That shift will require money before disasters strike.

Many developing countries are already trying to adapt, recover from extreme events, transform their economies and reduce emissions while servicing heavy debt. Climate finance, Maharaj said, arrives too slowly and is often supplied through loans that add to that burden.

“A disaster drains public funds into emergency response and reconstruction. That leaves less money to reduce the risks posed by the next event, which then hits a weakened country even harder. Each turn of that wheel reduces the very capacity we need to climb out of it.”

Breaking the cycle will require grants, upfront financing and investment in prevention, rather than repeatedly paying to rebuild after losses.

A Deeper Injustice

Overshoot also raises questions of climate justice, particularly for countries with little historical responsibility for the emissions driving warming.

“The harms concentrated during this period, especially those that turn out to be irreversible, fall hardest on the countries least responsible for the emissions that caused them,” Maharaj said.

Maharaj said contributing to the report carried a particular weight for her as a Caribbean scientist.

“For those of us from these islands, 1.5°C was never simply a number on a chart. It was the line we were told represented survival. It was the line at which we were told survival was still possible,” she said. “Now, helping to write the science of what lies beyond that line is a heavy thing, both personally and professionally.”

Crossing 1.5°C, she said, represents “a profound failure of collective will” but not permission to give up.

“How high the peak rises, how long we remain there and how quickly temperatures are brought back down are all still ours to decide,” Maharaj said. “Every one of those choices will be measured in lives and livelihoods here in our region and across small islands.”

For small islands, limiting the overshoot could mean the difference between mounting losses and holding on to the places people call home.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Sep 4 2026 (IPS)

There is an older wisdom, quieter than the noise of our times, that whispers a simple truth: we are not the architects of nature, only its guests. Long before there were nations, economies, or even language, there was the pulse of the tide, the patience of coral, the breath of forests exchanging air with the sky. Into that ancient conversation we arrived — late, curious, and forgetful — mistaking our cleverness for sovereignty and our tools for wings.

Yet the sea remembers what we have forgotten. It remembers that every drop of rain has travelled through the roots of trees and the bodies of fish before returning to us as thirst quenched or harvest gathered. It remembers that the reef and the child, the mangrove and the fisherman, the albatross and the sailor, are all verses of the same unfinished poem. To live well is to learn that poem by heart — to know that when one line is silenced, the whole song grows thinner.

And still, something in us reaches further. The same species that learned to read the tides also learned to read the stars. From the first firelit night when a human being looked up and wondered, we have carried within us a quiet, luminous restlessness — a longing to know what lies beyond the horizon, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the reach of our brief lives. It is not vanity that drives this longing, but memory. Perhaps some ancient part of us recognises, in the distant glimmer of a star, a trace of our own origin — the stardust from which our bones were made, the cosmic seed from which life on this small blue world first stirred.

To be human, then, is to live in two directions at once. Downward, into the depths of the sea, where life first learned to breathe. Outward, into the vastness of space, where light itself becomes a form of scripture. Both journeys are acts of reverence. Both remind us that we are neither the centre nor the summit of creation, but its wondering witnesses — creatures endowed with the extraordinary gift of consciousness, and with it, the responsibility to use that gift with humility.

This is the paradox of our species: we are small enough to be humbled by a single wave, and large enough in imagination to send our thoughts across galaxies. We build submarines to touch the ocean floor and telescopes to touch the edge of time. Yet both instruments, in the end, do the same thing — they extend our capacity to wonder. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is the beginning of care.

Perhaps this is the deepest task of our century: not to choose between protecting our planet and exploring the cosmos, but to understand that the two callings are one. We cannot honour the stars while poisoning the seas. We cannot dream of new worlds while abandoning the one that gave us breath. The reef and the galaxy are written in the same handwriting. To care for one is to prepare ourselves, morally and spiritually, for the other.

Small-island nations know this instinctively. We live at the meeting point of sea and sky, where the horizon is a daily teacher. We understand that fragility and vastness are not opposites but companions — that the smallest coral polyp and the most distant nebula belong to the same continuum of creation. When we speak of protecting the ocean, we are not defending a resource; we are defending a relationship. And when humanity looks upward, dreaming of Mars or of life on some far-off moon, we are not escaping the Earth; we are extending the same longing that first drew our ancestors to the sea.

For those of us shaped by the ocean, this is not philosophy — it is instinct. We have always known that the horizon is not a boundary but an invitation, that the sea is not a possession but a companion, and that the night sky is not empty but full of the same silent kinship that binds us to the coral and the whale.

If humanity can learn, once more, to walk softly among its fellow travellers — on this small blue planet and among the countless worlds beyond — then perhaps our story will not end in exhaustion, but in reverence: the quiet dignity of a species that finally remembered it was never alone, and never was meant to be still.

James Alix Michel, is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles

IPS UN Bureau

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Drylands landscape near Kitui, Kitui County - Kenya. Credit: Axel Fassio/CIFOR

By Éliane Ubalijoro and Salina Abraham
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 1 2026 (IPS)

Open a can of something fizzy and the reason the sugar doesn’t separate immediately is gum arabic, tapped by hand from acacia trees across the Sahel. Spray on perfume and the reason the scent is still there at dinner is frankincense, a resin cut from Boswellia trees on the dry escarpments of the Horn of Africa. The fat that gives a chocolate bar its snap may well be shea, gathered and pressed by women in the parkland belt of West Africa. The cashmere jumper came from goats that can only be raised on cold, dry rangelands.

These are drylands. They cover 44 per cent of the planet’s land, hold 44 per cent of the world’s cropland and half its livestock, and two billion people live in them. We have spent decades describing them as empty or unproductive. For a long list of things most of us use without thinking, they are the only places on earth that produce them at all.

It is no secret that our world is becoming hotter and drier. Three quarters of the planet’s land experienced drier conditions in the last 30 years than the previous 30. This year’s El Niño is intensifying fast, compelling the world to look back at what dryland systems already know. Nearly every model now points to a record-strength event: the US Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of a “very strong” El Niño at over 90 per cent for this fall and winter, and a 69 per cent chance it exceeds anything on record since 1950.

Drylands have been living through exactly this kind of shock-and-recovery cycle for generations, and their playbook offers real lessons. Farmers in places that have always been able to count on rain are beginning to face a question that dryland farmers answered generations ago: what do you grow, and how, when the water is not guaranteed?

Dryland systems are the longest-running operating record anywhere of producing value under conditions of scarcity, volatility and shock. These landscapes are home to generations of knowledge on how to thrive with limited water and high variability. This includes practices such as spreading risk across several crops and animals rather than betting the season on one, understanding land closely enough to move livestock before the pressure is too much, and building income that arrives at different times of the year so a bad month is not a ruined one. These are powerful lessons needed now.

Now is the time to listen and learn from dryland communities, practices, and regenerative production models. When this wisdom, data, and experience serve as our foundation, we can transition to sustainable business models and unlock investments to power our future world using knowledge that already exists in the places we have been calling marginal.

Mongolia, the host of the recently concluded UN’s COP17 talks under the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), is a case in point. Three quarters of Mongolia’s land is already classified as degraded or at risk. However, Mongolian herders supply 40 per cent of the world’s raw cashmere, increasingly innovating to shift away from an extractive model to practices that generate diverse value, from wool to grass-fed meat, examples of what a healthy landscape can offer.

In northern Ghana, the Ojoba Women’s Shea Cooperative processes shea butter by hand in the arid Upper East Region, using a skill passed down through generations. They now supply international buyers including L’Occitane and Lush.

In both instances, the land already had value, and the skills already existed within the communities. What was missing was a route to the market willing to pay for them. These initiatives demonstrate what is possible when investment is designed around the realities and value in drylands.

Investment can take many forms: from financing cooperatives through the shift to new practices; insurance that pays out on rainfall; water and energy infrastructure that keeps a harvest sellable in extreme heat. There is growth potential beyond raw commodities too; processing into oils, powders, waxes compounds the returns. And payments for ecosystem services, from stored carbon, biodiversity and watershed protection, sit alongside that.

Donors like the European Union have already recognised the value of drylands with the €20 million Thrivelands initiative, led by Landscape Alliance, to build the coalitions and action this work needs; including innovations needed to protect and restore land. These innovations range from the tools to monitor and restore soil health accurately to the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework and the Regreening Africa app, which brings this data into the hands of farmers.

But public funding alone cannot unlock the drylands opportunities. Adapting to a drier world means restoring a broken nature finance system and closing the $700 billion finance gap to apply proven expertise across a growing area.

Many companies already depend on drylands through what they source, without having assessed how much of their supply comes from them. For those in the agrifood, textiles, and cosmetics sectors, investing in restoring and protecting these landscapes is a way to stabilise their supply chains, manage growing levels of risk and meet climate goals.

There is also the question of what inaction costs. Investing in drylands agriculture could avert a 12 per cent reduction in global food production over the next 25 years and prevent the release of about 60 per cent of stored carbon.

COP17 is a reminder of how little time is left. The UNCCD finance framework closes in 2030, with 82 per cent of the cumulative need for finance unmet. Time is running out to leverage the lessons from drylands to protect future food security. The gap between what is needed and what is being invested remains enormous.

The landscapes on which our future depends may be getting drier, but they are not devoid of opportunity. With science and innovation that enhances traditional knowledge, they are saturated with opportunities to bolster food security and climate resilience.

Dr Éliane Ubalijoro, chief executive officer of Landscape Alliance
Salina Abraham, Head of Thrivelands, Landscape Alliance

IPS UN Bureau

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Closing plenary at UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Credit: Anastasia Rodopoulou/ENB-IISD

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Aug 31 2026 (IPS)

When the rains fail across Tanzania’s northern Maasai Steppe, herders drive their cattle farther in search of pasture and water.

Boreholes run low. Cattle lose weight, milk yields fall and families begin selling cows, often their main source of livelihood. If the dry spell persists, herds can die, leaving families facing hunger.

What is happening on the Maasai Steppe is part of a wider debate over how the world’s rangelands should be restored. At the UN desertification summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, governments backed a $1.2 billion programme to restore rangelands, alongside measures to repair degraded land and prepare for drought.

For African pastoralists, the question is whether that money will reach them before the next drought.

Governments, meanwhile, failed to seal a global drought agreement, pushing the dispute into another round of negotiations in Egypt in 2028.

The consequences are particularly serious in Africa, where millions depend on livestock for food and income. Restoring pasture could help pastoralists survive dry years, but it will not solve the problem if grazing routes disappear, drought warnings arrive too late or funds fail to reach the people managing the land.

“The $1.2 billion Rangelands Flagship Initiative is an important recognition that rangelands are not wastelands or marginal areas,” said Ephraim Mtengeti, Professor of Range Sciences at Sokoine University of Agriculture.

“They are productive ecosystems that support millions of people, livestock, biodiversity and important ecological functions. For Africa, where pastoralism remains central to rural livelihoods, giving these landscapes greater financial and political attention is long overdue.”

The 45 projects sit within a wider $1.3 billion programme covering land restoration and drought measures in 23 countries. About $644.5 million is new finance, while another $216 million had already been confirmed.

The pledge is substantial, but it is small compared with the scale of the funding gap. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification estimates that about $355 billion a year will be needed until 2030 to meet global land-restoration commitments. Current investment is about $77 billion.

That leaves a shortfall of roughly $278 billion a year.

Private finance accounts for only about 6% of restoration investment. Governments and development agencies are therefore looking to blended finance, using public money to make projects that might otherwise appear too risky more attractive to private investors.

Many of the benefits of restoring rangelands, however, are difficult to turn into financial returns.

Peter Bakker, president and chief executive of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, said companies were willing to invest but needed projects that could make money.

“Business does not lack appetite for resilient supply chains, secure water and productive soil – it lacks bankable projects, credible data and a fair share of the early risk,” he said.

Mtengeti agreed that private investment was needed but warned against judging restoration solely by the returns it could generate.

“The financing gap is enormous, so it is understandable that COP17 is looking towards private capital and blended finance,” he said.

“But investors will naturally look for financial returns, whereas many of the most important benefits of rangeland restoration — water security, biodiversity, carbon storage, food security and social stability — are public goods.”

Rangelands as Economic Infrastructure

Rangelands cover about 54% of the Earth’s land surface and support roughly 2 billion people, including 500 million pastoralists. They provide pasture for livestock while storing carbon, supporting biodiversity and helping regulate water.

Restoration could generate $4 to $6 for every dollar invested, rising to as much as $36 when wider public benefits are included.

Restoring rangelands in Africa cannot simply mean fencing off land or imposing farming models designed for settled communities.

Pastoralism depends on mobility. Herders move livestock as pasture and water shift, sometimes crossing national borders.

“Rangelands cannot be restored effectively by treating them like a conventional agricultural field,” Mtengeti said.

“These are dynamic ecosystems, and pastoral mobility is one of the mechanisms through which livestock production adapts to variable rainfall and pasture availability.”

The pressure on grazing land is also increasing. Farms, roads, conservation areas and settlements are taking up more dryland, leaving less room for herders. During drought, the pressure becomes acute as people and livestock crowd around the few remaining sources of grass and water.

“Drought does not respect political boundaries,” Mtengeti said. “Pastoral systems in East Africa are interconnected, and livestock movements often respond to ecological conditions rather than national borders.”

Who Gets the Money?

COP17 also highlighted a shift towards larger, landscape-wide projects rather than small, isolated conservation schemes.

They include Kenya’s TWENDE programme, locally led adaptation financing across Africa, the $35 million Herding for Health initiative and a $100 million African Development Bank programme covering the Zambezi River Basin.

Scale alone, however, will not guarantee better results. Money can still go astray when land rights are disputed, local authorities are weak or communities struggle to gain access to funds.

“Communities should not be treated merely as beneficiaries of projects designed somewhere else,” Mtengeti said.

“They have knowledge of their landscapes, their grazing patterns and how ecosystems respond to climatic variability. That knowledge must inform the design and implementation of restoration programmes.”

Access to international finance presents another obstacle.

“If international finance remains locked behind complicated procedures that local organisations cannot access, then some of the people most exposed to drought will continue to receive the least support,” Mtengeti said.

The Drought Gap

The failure to agree on a global drought agreement was one of COP17’s biggest setbacks. The issue had already been left unresolved at COP16. Governments remained divided over whether such an agreement should be legally binding, leaving the decision until 2028.

“The postponement of a global drought instrument is disappointing because drought is no longer an occasional shock that communities can simply recover from,” Mtengeti said.

“In many dryland areas, repeated droughts are eroding livestock assets, weakening household incomes and undermining the ecological foundation on which pastoral livelihoods depend.”

Governments do not have to wait for a global agreement. More than 70 countries now have national drought plans, compared with only three in 2013.

COP17 also launched the Drought Resilience Investment Facility, which aims to raise up to $400 million from public and private sources.

Finance will also have to be matched by preparedness. Early-warning systems, reliable data, functioning institutions and water infrastructure are crucial, as is acting before drought develops into a humanitarian emergency.

“Countries should not wait for a global instrument before strengthening their own drought preparedness and investing in anticipatory action,” Mtengeti said.

The deadlock over drought came despite progress elsewhere at the summit.

Joao Campari, global food and agriculture leader at WWF, said the summit had given greater prominence to rangelands, grasslands and nature-positive farming.

“Yet hope alone will not protect nature, limit climate change or put food on the table. COP17 has laid strong foundations, but the focus must now shift to implementation on the ground and supporting local communities to deliver lasting benefits for all,” he said.

Where Will the Money Come From?

Closing the funding gap will also require governments to change policies that continue to undermine land resilience.

The UNCCD estimates that about $2.4 trillion in public finance supports environmentally harmful subsidies. Redirecting even part of that money could dwarf many of the commitments announced in Ulaanbaatar.

Governments must also protect grazing corridors, strengthen community land rights and ensure that the people managing the land receive a meaningful share of investment.

“Healthy rangelands are economic infrastructure,” Mtengeti said.

“They support livestock production, food security, employment, water systems and biodiversity. When these landscapes degrade, the costs are eventually borne by households and governments through livestock losses, food insecurity, humanitarian assistance and environmental damage.”

For pastoralists, the outcome of COP17 points to a basic reality: rangelands cannot be treated as empty land waiting for a more profitable use. They are part of the economic infrastructure on which food supplies, livelihoods and climate resilience depend.

Mtengeti said the summit had moved rangelands higher up the international agenda but that the commitments would need to be followed by action in pastoral areas.

“COP17 should therefore be seen as a step forward, but not as a solution,” he said. “The financing commitments are encouraging, and the greater attention to rangelands is important. But Africa’s dryland communities need action that is predictable, locally grounded and delivered before drought becomes a crisis.”

When governments meet again in Egypt in 2028, the value of the Mongolian pledges will be judged by what has happened in the drylands: whether pasture has recovered, livestock can move safely, communities have gained access to finance and drought losses are falling.

For pastoralists, the pledges will ultimately be measured during the next drought, when they need pasture, water and support to keep their herds alive.
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By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Aug 26 2026 (IPS)

Across this vast ocean, the latest monitoring by Mercator Ocean International shows marine heatwave conditions ranging from moderate to severe. At the same time, the World Meteorological Organization expects a strong El Niño to intensify through August to October, with a positive Indian Ocean Dipole also likely to develop. These are not distant scientific signals. They are an urgent warning that the ocean system on which millions depend is under mounting stress.

The Indian Ocean in particular has sustained communities for generations. It provides food and livelihoods, carries trade and travel, shapes our cultures and moderates our climate. It is also one connected living system – its currents carry heat, nutrients, fish (as well as pollution, unfortunately) across borders drawn on maps. Its coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass meadows and open waters support people from the eastern coast of Africa to South Asia, and from the islands of the western Indian Ocean to the Maldives and beyond. When ocean temperatures rise abnormally, the consequences are not confined to a scientific bulletin. They are seen in the health of coral reefs, in the movement and abundance of fish, in the safety of coastal communities, and in the future of tourism and fisheries. They are felt in the weakening of the natural protection that reefs, mangroves and coastal habitats provide against erosion, flooding and storms.

Coral reefs are especially vulnerable. They can sometimes recover from an isolated bleaching event if temperatures fall quickly enough. But repeated bleaching and prolonged heat stress allow too little time for recovery. When reefs deteriorate, the consequences extend beyond biodiversity: fish habitats are lost, shorelines become more exposed, tourism suffers and communities lose part of their natural and cultural inheritance. This is why ocean warming is not simply an environmental issue. It is an issue of food security, jobs, development, economic stability and justice.

For decades, humanity has relied on the ocean’s exceptional capacity to cushion the climate crisis. The ocean absorbs more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions. By doing so, it has moderated atmospheric warming and spared humanity even more severe disruption. But there is a limit to what we can ask of the sea. Small island developing states have contributed little to the cumulative emissions destabilising the global climate. Yet we are among the first to face the consequences. We cannot move our reefs. We cannot relocate our coastlines without immense social and economic cost. We cannot separate the wellbeing of our people and economies from the health of the ocean. For island people, climate vulnerability is not an abstract concept. It is a daily reality.

Still, island states must not be viewed only as victims. We are custodians of extensive ocean spaces, centres of practical innovation and partners in the search for sustainable solutions. Seychelles has tried to demonstrate that economic development and marine conservation need not be enemies. Through marine spatial planning, Seychelles has committed 30 percent of its waters to protection, while advancing a blue economy vision based on stewardship rather than depletion. This is not charity towards nature. It is a recognition that there can be no enduring prosperity if fish stocks decline, reefs deteriorate and coastal ecosystems are damaged beyond recovery.

Across the Indian Ocean, other island and coastal states are also restoring habitats, improving fisheries management, investing in renewable energy, strengthening marine conservation and building more resilient communities. Their efforts deserve recognition and support. They show that those most exposed to climate risk are not waiting passively for rescue. They are protecting a shared ocean heritage, often with scarce resources. But local and regional action cannot substitute for the choices that must be made globally.

First, the world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions much more rapidly. Adaptation is indispensable, particularly for small island developing states. We need stronger early-warning systems, more ocean observation, investment in reef and coastal restoration, secure water supplies and infrastructure designed for a changing climate. But adaptation cannot indefinitely protect an ocean that continues to accumulate heat. No sea wall, restoration programme or emergency plan can replace decisive action to reduce emissions.

Second, climate finance must become fairer, faster and easier to access. Island states should not have to devote years of limited institutional capacity to complex procedures simply to secure support for renewable energy, water security, coastal protection, marine research and ecosystem restoration. Those facing the greatest climate risks require genuine partnership – not delayed promises, burdensome processes and inadequate resources.

Third, the countries of the Indian Ocean must deepen regional cooperation. Marine heatwaves, coral bleaching, illegal fishing, biodiversity loss and coastal erosion do not stop at national boundaries. We need better ocean observation, data-sharing and regional early-warning systems. We need stronger scientific cooperation, responsible fisheries management and coordinated protection of the ecosystems connecting our islands and coasts.

The Indian Ocean should not be seen merely as a corridor for trade or a theatre for geopolitical competition. It is a shared living system, whose health is fundamental to the security and prosperity of everyone who depends on it. The current warming should also remind us that the ocean is not an inexhaustible resource. It has regulated our climate, sustained our communities, supported our economies and linked our peoples for generations. Yet we still behave as though its capacity to absorb our impacts has no limits. It does.

The islands of the Indian Ocean are not asking for sympathy. We are calling for shared responsibility. We know that ocean health is inseparable from the security of our people. We know that protecting nature and pursuing development must go hand in hand. And we know that every year of delay makes adaptation more costly, the damage more severe and the choices before us more difficult. As a result, the Indian Ocean is sounding the alarm. Its islands are among the first to hear it. But the warning is not ours alone. It is for every country whose climate, food security, economy and future depend on a living ocean.

James Michel, is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles

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Simita Kumar, Education Officer at the Pacific Community (SPC), leads an engaging activity on the biodiversity of intertidal and coral reef ecosystems with young participants at the Veivueti Kids Ocean Conference. Credit: SPC

By Sera Sefeti
SUVA, Fiji, Aug 26 2026 (IPS)

For generations, Pacific children have grown up with the ocean as part of everyday life. It is where families fish, where stories are passed down, where livelihoods begin and where cultures are rooted.

Yet many young people are inheriting an ocean facing pressures unlike anything their ancestors experienced, from warming seas and coral bleaching to plastic pollution and declining marine ecosystems.

In New Caledonia, the ocean is becoming a classroom.

Students are collecting and analysing macro-, meso- and micro-plastics, measuring coastal erosion alongside environmental specialists and removing invasive species. They are also meeting women scientists and ocean professionals, discovering not only the challenges facing the sea but also the many professions and possibilities connected to it.

The work is being led by Comité Égalité pour tous à l’école, an NGO in New Caledonia, in partnership with the Pacific Community (SPC), bringing local ocean issues into student learning through hands-on activities and real-world experiences.

“Our programme raises awareness among young people across the Pacific about the challenges and professions of the sea in all its dimensions, with particular focus on gender equality and highlighting the role of women in ocean-related careers, science, and innovation,” says Véronique Mollot Lehoullier, President of Comité Égalité pour tous à l’école.

The programme began in New Caledonia in 2021 and has since extended to French Polynesia and Vanuatu, with the ambition of developing a model that can be replicated across Oceania.

At its heart is a simple idea: children learn best when they can experience what they are being taught.

For Mollot Lehoullier, the ocean cannot be understood through theory alone.

“It is by discovering ocean-related professions firsthand, meeting women scientists and professionals, and taking part in field trips that students truly grasp the stakes of protecting and valuing lagoon ecosystems,” she says.

“This hands-on approach turns abstract awareness into lasting civic engagement, giving young people concrete role models to identify with girls and boys alike.”

Students at the Veivueti Kids Ocean Conference taking part in an interactive activity at the SPC booth, identifying marine organisms commonly found in tidal zone ecosystems. Credit: SPC

That approach is helping turn ocean education from something children read about into something they can see, touch and experience.

It is also opening a window to futures they may not have previously imagined.

For a young girl, meeting a woman working in marine science or conservation can make an ocean-related career feel possible. For boys, it reinforces that the ocean and the responsibility to protect it belong to everyone.

And the response from students has been striking.

“They don’t watch the clock, and they’re never in a hurry to finish,” Mollot Lehoullier says.

Many students do not want to return to their regular classrooms. Instead, they stay behind to continue speaking with professionals, asking questions and taking part in activities.

“These aren’t theoretical lessons but activities the students are fully part of, so for them it doesn’t feel like work at all, it feels like interactive discovery.”

That sense of discovery is becoming increasingly important as Pacific communities confront a rapidly changing ocean.

For Maëva Tesan, Information, Communication and Knowledge Officer at SPC’s Pacific Community Centre for Ocean Science (PCCOS), strengthening ocean knowledge and ocean literacy in New Caledonia is an important part of that regional effort.

“While many local organisations are already actively working in this field, we have also expanded our involvement this year through several local initiatives, including the Sea Festival and the Science Festival,” she says.

For SPC, partnering with Comité Égalité pour tous à l’école builds on the organisation’s existing role in promoting inclusive education and brings together a shared commitment to raising young people’s awareness of the ocean.

“By working together, we can combine our expertise to strengthen ocean education and inspire the next generation of ocean stewards in New Caledonia,” Tesan says.

The ambition extends beyond one country.

The programme’s reach into French Polynesia and Vanuatu reflects a broader regional approach: building on local initiatives while sharing knowledge, resources and experiences across the Pacific.

Summit participants take part in a hands-on field activity, identifying marine organisms collected for study. Credit: SPC

From New Caledonia to Fiji

Across Fiji, a quiet movement is helping change how the next generation sees the ocean. Children who once viewed the sea simply as a place to swim, fish or spend time with friends are beginning to understand something much deeper: that the future of the Blue Pacific depends on the choices they make today.

For Hannah Nanovu, Whole School Ocean Coordinator at the International School Suva, watching that transformation unfold is one of the most rewarding parts of her work.

“Every year, the students surprise and inspire me through their passion, creativity, and commitment to learning more about the ocean and taking action,” Nanovu says.

“This year, having students travel from Beqa to participate was particularly inspiring, and seeing the conference grow each year, with more schools joining and schools travelling further to be part of it, reminds me that we are building a community of young ocean advocates across Fiji.”

That growing community came together once again at Veivueti Kids Ocean Conference, where students explored the ocean not just through science, but through culture, storytelling, traditional knowledge and hands-on learning.

Since developing its Whole School Ocean Programme in 2018, the International School Suva has used the conference to create a space where students can present research, exchange ideas and discover that every child—regardless of where they come from—has a role in protecting the ocean.

Behind that movement is a broader regional effort led by the Pacific Community (SPC).

Together, these efforts are part of a growing movement to strengthen ocean literacy across the Blue Pacific.

Leotasi Kautu, School Principal from Tuvalu, presents the 3D inundation model of Funafuti, developed by SPC and the Government of Tuvalu, to map flood risk and guide climate adaptation. Credit: SPC

Science that Begins at Home

For many students, science can sometimes feel distant.

Words such as biodiversity, ocean circulation, marine ecosystems and climate change can remain confined to textbook concepts to memorise, rather than realities that surround them.

But the Pacific offers a different classroom.

For SPC, this connection between knowledge, place and lived experience is central to strengthening ocean literacy across the region.

“Pacific communities have a deep cultural and traditional connection to the ocean, but more can be done to increase knowledge about ocean ecosystems, the challenges they face, and how we can protect them,” says Doreen Tuala, Team Leader for Curriculum and Assessment at SPC.

“The best place to start addressing this need is through education, especially by engaging young people.”

The challenge and the opportunity is that there is no single Pacific classroom.

The region encompasses hundreds of islands, diverse cultures and languages, different education systems and communities whose relationships with the ocean vary from one place to another.

That means ocean education cannot simply be copied from one country to the next.

Instead, regional approaches need to create space for local knowledge, culture and experience.

Students can investigate the health of coral reefs they know, explore the importance of mangroves to their communities, examine fisheries that support their families and learn about coastal changes occurring around them.

They can also learn from elders and communities, recognising that Pacific peoples have long understood the ocean through observation, experience and generations of lived knowledge.

Tuala says connecting learning to students’ everyday lives gives them an opportunity to investigate issues that are not abstract, but immediate.

These include coral reef health, sustainable fisheries, coastal erosion, marine pollution and the impacts of climate change.

“When students can connect what they are learning to their everyday lives, local environments and cultural knowledge, they are better able to understand these challenges and explore solutions,” she says.

From Learners to Ocean Guardians

Recognising that ocean stewardship begins long before adulthood, SPC is strengthening its regional commitment to ocean literacy through partnerships, education initiatives and practical learning.

Its work includes strengthening science education through a partnership with National Geographic Pristine Seas, expanding locally relevant teaching materials through the EQAP Ocean Literacy Resources Repository, and supporting practical learning experiences such as Fiji’s Veivueti Kids Ocean Conference.

Together, these initiatives are helping bring ocean literacy into Pacific education in ways that reflect the realities of Pacific children.

“Through this partnership, we are bringing together scientific expertise, educational resources and regional networks to support countries in integrating ocean literacy into education systems,” Tuala says.

The partnership combines SPC’s curriculum expertise with National Geographic Pristine Seas’ experience in marine science, exploration and conservation.

But ambition goes beyond lesson plans.

It is about helping close a long-standing gap in structured ocean education that reflects Pacific realities allowing children to learn about marine environments through ecosystems, examples, cultures and experiences they recognize as their own.

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Photo highlighting the activities and successes of the 'Promoting Nature-based Solutions for Land Restoration while Strengthening National Monitoring Technical Working Group in Kenya: Phase 2' project funded by UK PACT. Credit: Anthony Ochieng/CIFOR-ICRAF

By Lulseged Tamene Desta and Cargele Masso
NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 26 2026 (IPS)

Several coalitions exist today to defend the territories in which people live and work. Global leaders have long understood the importance of shared responsibility for collective security and have invested significant time in establishing networks, partnerships and alliances. In 2025, global spending on defense reached a record $2.9 trillion.

But the global community is increasingly recognizing that today’s gravest existential risks arise from a war being waged against nature itself – and our defenses are woefully fragmented and underfunded. The world is investing only about $220 billion a year for nature-based solutions, compared to $7.3 trillion for nature-negative activities.

This is not just a discrete, isolated environmental concern. The triple planetary crises of land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change are worsening food insecurity, water scarcity and ecosystem collapse, threatening millions of lives.

Collectively, the impact of the ongoing assault on nature is amplifying conflict, worsening migration, driving inflation higher, and fomenting geopolitical instability. Unless restoration and sustainable management of resources is in place, the world is expected to lose more than US$23 trillion by 2050, while halting this trend would cost around $4.6 trillion.

Many solutions to these interconnected crises exist but have been ineffective to date. Limited coordination and collaboration between countries, sectors and disciplines, as well as insufficient resources and short-term approaches to long-term challenges, mean we are far behind the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Despite compelling evidence of the costs of degradation, investment remains far below what is needed because opportunities are rarely presented as credible, investable propositions.

To change this, two things must happen. First, governments, international agencies, academia and civil society must unite through a grand coalition to bring together those currently working in isolation to achieve greater impact than the sum of their parts – a kind of mutual pact to protect nature.

Photo highlighting the activities and successes of the ‘Promoting Nature-based Solutions for Land Restoration while Strengthening National Monitoring Technical Working Group in Kenya: Phase 2’ project funded by UK PACT. Credit: Anthony Ochieng/CIFOR-ICRAF

And second, this grand coalition must also engineer a funding paradigm shift from focusing on environmental challenges to investing in the many opportunities of conservation and restoration.

The ongoing UN COP17 desertification talks in Mongolia, where the theme is “Restoring Land, Restoring Hope”, is the perfect opportunity to progress this.

Evidence shows that integrated approaches to address landscape degradation solve multiple interconnected challenges.

For example, investment in soil and water conservation in the Adarsha watershed in southern India has been found to improve water availability, agricultural productivity, and rural livelihoods. Analysis showed that yields of maize intercropped with pigeonpea increased by 148% while households in the watershed were less affected by droughts compared to those in the non-watershed area.

In Kenya and Tanzania, the adoption of Participatory Rangeland Management improved rangeland condition and resilience to climate shocks for more than 90% of participating communities.

Despite evidence from these successes, these interventions are not being invested in and applied at the scale needed to transform the world’s food, land and water systems in ways that can build long-term, far-reaching resilience.

Countries, donors, financing institutions and civil society must come together in a grand coalition to direct the coordination, governance and investment necessary to tackle these crises where they all interconnect: at the landscape level.

A grand coalition would offer a dedicated focal point to integrate and advance the UN’s goals for climate, biodiversity and land degradation, allowing for stronger coordination and shaping the global agenda for informed decision-making. Critically, the coalition would lead the redirection away from ineffective, siloed solutions and the self-defeating environmental trade-offs they create.

A grand coalition would also create a platform for establishing the rigorous systems of governance essential to achieving global goals for nature, including fair and inclusive land tenure and governance over water systems. Understanding the true cost of landscape governance and inaction is instrumental for adequate investments.

Lastly, a grand coalition would gather the evidence to help shift the emphasis of finance for nature towards investments that benefit everyone. By identifying a menu of options for turning grand challenges into grand opportunities, the coalition would unlock the financing from banks, donors, philanthropies and other development funders needed to scale interventions globally.

The UNCCD COP17 talks in Mongolia is not just an opportunity to address the challenges facing land. It’s a moment to foster unity around a shared threat to all of our territories. CGIAR and its partners will play its part by developing an investment plan to anchor greater coordination in collaboration with the grand coalition of action for shared human and planetary outcomes.

Landscapes are where our greatest environmental and human challenges today are playing out, from declining biodiversity to the deforestation driving climate change, to increasing levels of food insecurity.

Investing in multifunctional landscapes through a unified global coalition, therefore, is not simply an environmental imperative for the world, but also a strategic one. Galvanizing support for landscape-centered solutions can simultaneously reduce future risks and strengthen economies and communities.

A global coalition for restoring and protecting landscapes would recognize a defining reality of the 21st century: protecting nature is fundamental for protecting us all.

Dr. Lulseged Tamene Desta, is Director of the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program
Cargele Masso, is Director of the CGIAR’s Environmental Health and Biodiversity Impact Area Platform

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By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Aug 24 2026 (IPS)

For pastoralists in Arvaikheer — a village in Mongolia’s dry central plains — rain can determine whether there is enough grass for cattle to roam, whether waterholes are replenished and whether families make it through another dry season. But as climate change makes rainfall increasingly unpredictable, even a wet season may no longer provide water and pasture needed to sustain people and livestock.

The challenges being experienced across Mongolia’s drylands are at the centre of discussions at the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) in Ulaanbaatar, where governments are devising measures to tackle menacing drought, desertification and land degradation.

It is against this backdrop that the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has announced plans for a new $140 million initiative aimed at helping countries prepare for drought, strengthen resilience in drylands and reduce the growing risks to ecosystems, food security, water availability, livelihoods and health.

The Drylands and Drought Management Integrated Program will be implemented during the GEF-9 investment cycle from 2026 to 2030. It responds to requests from parties to the UNCCD for the GEF to give greater priority to financing programs related to drought resilience.

The program will focus on helping countries and communities better prepare for, monitor, assess, mitigate and respond to the cascading impacts of drought.

“Investing in healthy land and healthy people means investing in food security, climate resilience, biodiversity, water, jobs, and peace,” said the GEF Interim CEO and Chairperson, Claude Gascon, in a statement. “Through this new integrated program, we will support countries in moving from crisis response toward proactive drought resilience.”

The announcement comes as negotiators at COP17 are discussing an array of measures to tackle drought and land degradation, including financing, private-sector engagement, capacity-building and support for rangelands and pastoralists.

Participants in traditional dress take part in a cultural presentation during the 17th session of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Credit: Anastasia Rodopoulou/ENB-IISD

Rangelands Under Pressure

Rangelands have emerged as a major focus of the Ulaanbaatar talks.

Delegates have been discussing policies and investments for their sustainable management while recognising the importance of rangelands and pastoralist communities in addressing food insecurity, desertification, land degradation, drought, biodiversity loss and climate change.

For pastoralists, the effects of changing rainfall patterns are already devastating.

After rain, parched rangelands can quickly turn green, water sources refill and livestock gain access to fresh pasture. But the COP17 discussions have highlighted how climate change is altering these life-sustaining rains, making them more erratic and intense and reducing their effectiveness through increased runoff.

Land degradation can increase risks to human health, contribute to forced migration and intensify conflicts over scarce resources. It is also closely linked to climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty and food insecurity.

The GEF’s new program, therefore, comes at a time when drought is increasingly treated as a development and livelihood challenge rather than solely as an environmental emergency.

Aftermath of a rain storm at the 17th session of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Credit: Anastasia Rodopoulou/ENB-IISD

Financing Remains a Challenge

But international commitments to increase investment in drylands will face a litmus test to ensure that money reaches communities managing these landscapes.

During an open dialogue at COP17, civil society participants highlighted barriers to accessing funds as one of the challenges facing pastoralist communities, alongside pressures such as mining.

Participants called for better connections between financing and market mechanisms and the diverse local economies of pastoralists. They also urged governments and institutions to integrate targets for land degradation neutrality with pastoralist-designed and community-led initiatives.

That emphasis on local participation is significant for the GEF, which says that under GEF-9, 20 percent of resources across its family of funds are expected to directly benefit Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

Delegates at COP17 have also welcomed the Rangelands Flagship Initiative, a multi-partner global initiative led by Mongolia and the UNCCD. The initiative is built around three areas: knowledge, investment and institutions.

The GEF is supporting its development and coordination through the UNCCD COP17 Legacy Project, a $3.3 million GEF investment implemented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The project is leveraging an additional $8 million in co-financing from Mongolia and IUCN, according to the GEF.

The co-chair consults with the secretary during the Ulaanbaatar International Conference on Combating Desertification as delegates discuss strategies to strengthen global efforts to address land degradation, drought and desertification. Credit: Anastasia Dodopoulou/ENB-IISD

A Wider Investment Push

The new drought program is part of a broader expansion of environmental financing under GEF-9.

The investment cycle begins with an initial programming level of $3.9 billion and is designed to expand investments in nature-positive development, drought resilience and sustainable land management.

Four GEF-9 integrated programs are strongly aligned with UNCCD objectives and are expected to receive more than $800 million in GEF grant funding. They cover food systems, critical forest biomes, blue and green islands and drylands and drought management.

Drought resilience is also being given a more prominent place in the way GEF resources are allocated and measured.

The GEF-9 cycle includes a dedicated objective for implementing national drought plans, a drought vulnerability index in the formula used to calculate resource allocation to countries and new indicators to track improvements in drought resilience.

The approach reflects a growing recognition that drought can insidiously weaken ecosystems, livelihoods and food systems long before it becomes a full-blown crisis, leaving communities more exposed to the next shock.

From Crisis Response to Prevention

The GEF also plans to work with the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership, the Drought Resilience Investment Facility and other initiatives supporting resilience across drylands and rangelands.

During GEF-8, covering 2022 to 2026, the facility approved 50 projects across its family of funds supporting sustainable rangeland management and restoration and pastoralist livelihoods, with a total investment of more than $300 million.

The projects are at different stages of development and, according to the GEF, can complement the Rangelands Flagship Initiative and help take successful approaches to rangeland management and restoration to scale.

The new initiative also places a stronger emphasis on mobilising private capital.

Ten percent of total GEF-9 funding is allocated to a blended finance window, while the overall target is to use 25 percent of GEF resources to help mobilise private sector investment.

For countries vulnerable to drought, the challenge will be converting those financial commitments into practical investments that strengthen water security, restore degraded land and protect the livelihoods of communities dependent on drylands.

At COP17, where discussions on drought, rangelands, financing and pastoralist livelihoods are unfolding simultaneously, the GEF initiative offers a potentially significant new source of funding.

But the experience of pastoralist communities points to a broader question: whether global commitments and financing mechanisms can reach the people managing the land on the ground — and whether investments can arrive early enough to prevent drought from becoming a crisis.

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Indigenous Peoples' organisations have called for better support for their meaningful participation at COP 17 and across this year’s Rio Conventions gatherings. Credit: Anastasia Rodopoulou/IISD/ENB

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 18 2026 (IPS)

Indigenous communities have long advocated for the environment through the lens of their traditional knowledge systems and cultures. But much more work needs to be done to translate their presence into influence.

A new report from Nia Tero, an international nonprofit that aims to strengthen Indigenous guardianship over ancestral lands and waters, examines the factors that have limited Indigenous Peoples’ influence in global environmental decision-making.

The report, “Beyond Fragmentation: Advancing Coherence, Equity, and Indigenous Leadership Across the Rio Conventions”, was formally launched at the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), or COP17, currently underway in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, during a side event focused on strengthening coherence across the Rio Conventions.

The UNCCD is one of three climate frameworks that emerged from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It, along with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is one of the landmark global conventions that address environmental crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification in the modern age.

This year, all three conventions will be hosting climate conferences, starting with UNCCD COP17, which makes it an appropriate occasion to launch the report, according to Margarita Mora, Chief Programmes Officer at Nia Tero.

The goal of the report, Mora told Inter Press Service, is to “encourage Parties, UN bodies, and funders to better support Indigenous Peoples’ meaningful participation here and across this year’s Rio Conventions gatherings”.

Margarita Mora, Chief Programmes Officer, Nia Tero. Credit: Nia Tero

“Launching the report at COP17 helps draw greater attention to the UNCCD, which remains the least known of the three Rio Conventions, and starts a conversation we can carry into the climate and biodiversity COPs later this year,” said Minnie Degawan of the Kankanaey-Igorot, an indigenous group from northern Luzon, Philippines, and the Managing Director, FSC Indigenous Foundation.

The report examines Indigenous Peoples’ recognition and participation in the Rio Conventions. Climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation are all interconnected. These all impact lands and territories, which are “central to Indigenous Peoples’ identity, cultures, and ways of life,” Degawan, the report’s author, told Inter Press Service.

Drawing on expert interviews and surveys with participants, the report reveals what it describes as a fragmented response to these issues. While environmental harms are interconnected, they are governed through their frameworks, institutions and funding streams. This siloed approach to the Rio Conventions presents challenges to Indigenous Peoples. Representatives may be expected to attend multiple conferences where they discuss related issues through different institutional structures. Thus, they address topics like safeguards, territorial governance, and traditional knowledge separately.

Minnie Degawan of the Kankanaey-Igorot, an indigenous group from northern Luzon, Philippines, and the Managing Director, FSC Indigenous Foundation. Credit: SC Indigenous Foundation

The recognition of Indigenous Peoples has seen considerable progress since the Rio Conventions were first introduced. Traditional leaders and activists have advocated for the formal acknowledgement of Indigenous rights in these climate frameworks, their efforts spanning decades. The report notes that this recognition is not consistent across the frameworks.

Neither the UNFCCC nor the UNCCD explicitly referenced Indigenous Peoples or their rights in their original texts. However, subsequent decisions, provisions and ongoing advocacy have strengthened the recognition of Indigenous Peoples, their rights and their participation within the two frameworks. On the other hand, the CBD directly references Indigenous and local communities in its original framework, acknowledging their dependence on biological resources in accordance with traditional knowledge that is relevant to biodiversity efforts.

Since then, Indigenous people’s engagement within the Rio Conventions can be measured in a few ways, including a broader recognition of them as stakeholders within these processes, participation in formal and informal conferences, and a recognition of traditional knowledge in addressing environmental challenges.

While the visibility and participation of Indigenous representatives has increased over the years, this does not necessarily translate into meaningful influence when it comes to decision-making processes. The decisions in these frameworks are largely determined by the States, with insufficient input from Indigenous Peoples at these conferences. Indigenous Peoples still attend climate conferences as observers, with limited influence in formal text negotiations. The influence should “[go] beyond having Indigenous Peoples in the room”, Degawan said.

As she elaborates in the report, Indigenous Peoples’ participation in text negotiation is somewhat limited. Most of their involvement in climate conferences takes place in side events or informal dialogues. This is ironic, given that the report was launched at a side event. Structural barriers such as language constraints, accreditation issues, travel and visa issues and insufficient funding only further limit opportunities.

This is also indicative of a wider issue of the cost of participation. Indigenous representatives are expected to attend multiple meetings, which require extensive investments and resources. This is in service to increasing their visibility, but at present it creates a risk of burnout and a concentration of knowledge and expertise among what is a relatively small group of experienced negotiators and technical experts.

All of these factors emphasise the need to improve conditions for Indigenous Peoples to enact meaningful influence in climate discussions. “It means creating the conditions for Indigenous Peoples to actually shape decisions – from setting priorities and contributing to negotiating texts before they are finalised to influencing how commitments are implemented and financed,” Degawan said.

What Degawan and the report observe is that representatives can build on existing benchmarks within the Rio Conventions and identify where their participation has been stronger, so they can apply these strategies across all three. This would mean building greater coherence among existing structures so that different institutions and actors work together in a way that reflects the interconnected nature of environmental challenges and the realities Indigenous Peoples experience. For their part, Nia Tero are dedicating their efforts to supporting coordinated Indigenous engagement during UNCCD COP17.

“The goal is not to create new benchmarks, but to ensure that progress in one convention can help raise the standard for meaningful Indigenous Peoples’ participation across the others,” Degawan said.

“The real measure of progress is whether participation translates into meaningful influence over negotiations and decisions affecting Indigenous Peoples and ancestral territories. Full, meaningful inclusion of Indigenous Peoples at this and the following Rio Conventions COPs will put the international community – not just Indigenous Peoples – in the best position to achieve humanity’s shared goals for a healthy, prosperous planet,” said Mora.

The report recommends that the convention secretariats move beyond making rhetorical commitments and take practical steps, including improving Indigenous Peoples’ access to negotiating spaces and providing them with more opportunities to input into negotiating texts. These bodies should also strengthen safeguards to ensure Indigenous participation mechanisms are not treated in isolation.

Progress in their participation across the Rio Conventions warrants reflection on Indigenous Peoples’ representation in other frameworks. Within the context of broader structural changes, such as those introduced under the UN80 initiative, there have been questions of consolidating mandates in the name of increasing efficiency in the UN system, which should serve every member of the international community.

Degawan warned that Indigenous representatives are concerned over a potential weakening of the hard-won gains in recognition and formal spaces within the UN system. Any reforms should therefore, she said, build on these gains rather than roll them back.

The full report is available at www.niatero.org/RioReport

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SBI7 Secretariat in a huddle. Credit: IISD/ENB | Danny

By Stella Paul
NAIROBI, Aug 18 2026 (IPS)

Despite record participation in global biodiversity reporting and planning processes, countries remain off track to meet the world’s 2030 biodiversity goals, according to discussions that concluded this month at two key meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Delegates left Nairobi with a package of recommendations on conservation, finance, business accountability and implementation that will now move to COP17 in Yerevan, Armenia, where governments will assess collective progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF).

The warning emerged from two back-to-back meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity: the 28th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-28), held from 27 July to 1 August 2026, and the seventh meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI-7), held from 4 to 12 August 2026. Together, the meetings were the last major negotiating session before COP17, which kicked off yesterday (August 18, 2026), where governments will conduct the first formal review of collective progress towards the KMGBF and consider measures to speed up implementation in the second half of the decade.

A Global Review Reveals the Gap Between Commitment and Delivery

The first global review of the KMGBF dominated discussions across both meetings. The review came at the halfway point between the adoption of the framework in 2022 and its 2030 deadline, drawing on an unprecedented volume of national submissions. By February 2026, 172 parties had submitted national biodiversity targets aligned with the framework, while 130 parties had filed national reports on implementation.

The assessment also examined 85 National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), more than 180 commitments from non-state actors, submissions from multilateral organisations, and dozens of case studies from Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

Taken together, the submissions painted a mixed picture. Governments have integrated the framework into national planning processes at an unprecedented rate, but progress remains uneven. The review found encouraging movement on several conservation-related targets, while action on biodiversity finance, subsidy reform, business accountability and inclusive governance lagged behind. It also exposed significant weaknesses in monitoring and reporting, with countries citing data gaps, financial constraints, limited technical capacity and institutional challenges as barriers to tracking progress.

The overarching conclusion was clear: despite growing engagement, the world is not on track to achieve the framework’s 2030 targets.

“It is true that progress is being made across all targets. However, implementation is not yet happening at the pace and scale needed to achieve the KMGBF. Fewer than half of aligned national targets assessed by Parties are currently on track, with some of the largest gaps in mobilising biodiversity finance, reforming harmful subsidies, addressing business impacts and dependencies, and shifting toward sustainable consumption,” said Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the CBD.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, of IIFB, spoke at the SBI on August 9. She called for Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ greater engagement in decision-making processes. CREDIT: IISD

Wildlife, Technology and Emerging Governance Challenges

The implementation gap was reflected across several of the issues discussed in Nairobi, from wildlife management and emerging technologies to business accountability and biodiversity finance.

Discussions on sustainable wildlife management and synthetic biology highlighted the growing complexity of biodiversity governance. Delegates debating sustainable wildlife management moved well beyond questions of species conservation, examining how biodiversity policies intersect with livelihoods, equitable benefit-sharing, community participation and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

The discussions reflected a growing recognition that conservation measures are more likely to succeed when they incorporate social and economic considerations alongside ecological objectives. Representing the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), Jennifer Tauli Corpuz argued that effective wildlife management depends on the “transparent, structured and meaningful participation” of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in decision-making processes.

Synthetic biology presented a different set of challenges. While delegates broadly agreed on the need to strengthen capacity-building, scientific cooperation and knowledge-sharing, discussions also exposed ongoing questions about how international biodiversity institutions should respond to rapidly evolving technologies. As scientific innovation advances, governments are increasingly being asked to balance potential benefits with concerns related to governance, risk management and oversight.

Taken together, the two agenda items illustrated how biodiversity negotiations are evolving. Future CBD discussions are likely to focus increasingly on balancing ecological objectives with technological innovation, social equity and effective governance.

Business Accountability Under Greater Scrutiny

A major focus of SBSTTA-28 was the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Business and Biodiversity Assessment, which examined how companies and financial institutions influence biodiversity outcomes.

Presenting the findings, IPBES Chair David Obura said the assessment identifies more than 100 practical actions that companies can take across their operations, supply chains and financial portfolios to reduce biodiversity impacts and support nature recovery.

“Businesses can no longer be seen only as drivers of biodiversity loss. They are also an essential part of the solution,” Obura said, adding that companies already have tools available to begin addressing biodiversity risks and dependencies.

The assessment linked many recommendations to KMGBF Target 15 on business disclosure and accountability. Negotiations highlighted continuing debates over disclosure requirements, supply-chain transparency and biodiversity impact reporting, underscoring growing expectations that corporate biodiversity impacts be measured rather than merely acknowledged.

The opening plenary of the 28th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-28) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. CREDIT: Ahmed Nayim Yussuf/UNEP

Finance Emerges as a Central Political Challenge

At SBI-7, discussions shifted from technical issues to implementation challenges, including resource mobilisation, capacity-building, biodiversity mainstreaming and the Convention’s financial mechanisms.

The prominence of finance was closely linked to the findings of the global review, which identified finance among the weakest-performing areas of the framework. Although biodiversity finance has increased since the KMGBF was adopted, the review concluded that progress remains insufficient and that the 2025 milestone of mobilising USD 20 billion annually in international biodiversity finance was likely not achieved. Countries also reported continued challenges in securing financial resources, technology transfer and technical support needed for implementation.

These findings shaped much of the discussion at SBI-7, where delegates debated resource mobilisation, the Convention’s financial mechanism and the role of the Cali Fund, which is intended to channel private-sector contributions toward biodiversity conservation. While broad agreement exists on the need for greater biodiversity finance, significant differences remain over how resources should be raised, governed and distributed.

Echoing concerns raised by many developing countries, a delegate from the African Union stressed that “adequate, predictable and accessible financial resources are essential conditions for developing countries to translate global commitments into concrete national actions”.

“Ambition alone is not enough to accelerate implementation: it requires commensurate means,” he added.

Youth and Gender Advocates Push for More Inclusive Governance

Youth representatives from the Global Youth Biodiversity Network (GYBN) welcomed progress on sustainable wildlife management but argued that current recommendations do not go far enough on business accountability, calling for stronger provisions on transparency, traceability and biodiversity impact assessments throughout wildlife-related supply chains. More broadly, youth advocates also called for greater inclusion in biodiversity decision-making. “A global review of progress is incomplete if it does not reflect the information, concerns, needs and priorities of youth and other rights-holders,” said a GYBN delegate.

Preparations ahead of COP17 have also drawn greater attention to gender-responsive biodiversity governance. In Armenia, the CBD Women’s Caucus, together with the Armenian COP17 Presidency, the CBD Secretariat and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, organised a training programme to strengthen women’s participation in biodiversity policy processes.

Mrinalini Rai of Women4Biodiversity argued that women, youth, Indigenous Peoples and local communities are not simply stakeholders but rather “key actors in the implementation, monitoring and review of the framework.” She said their knowledge systems, leadership and contributions are fundamental to ensuring biodiversity policies are “equitable, inclusive and effective”.

These discussions reflect a growing recognition that implementation challenges are not only technical or financial but also institutional and that broader participation is essential to strengthening biodiversity governance and implementation.

Looking Ahead to COP17

Despite the challenges identified in the review, Schomaker expressed optimism about the road to COP17.

“I think that we can all leave Nairobi with a sense of satisfaction at what we have accomplished here, but the task awaiting us in Yerevan in nine weeks will take all the stamina and determination that Parties can summon.”

When governments gather in Yerevan in October for COP17, they will face a clear challenge: turning commitments into the financial, institutional and policy action needed to keep the framework’s 2030 goals within reach.

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Participants in traditional dress take part in a cultural welcome at the UNCCD COP17 venue in Ulaanbaatar on Aug. 17, 2026, highlighting the cultural diversity of communities whose livelihoods are closely linked to rangelands. Credit: UN photo

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Aug 17 2026 (IPS)

After moving more than 6,000 km across Eurasia, the Silk Road Caravan has reached Mongolia with stories from pastoralists whose livelihoods are increasingly threatened by drought, degraded land and shrinking access to grazing areas.

Since leaving Türkiye in May, the thud of horse hooves has echoed through landscapes in the Russian Federation, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and China. Along the way, its riders met pastoralists adapting to a harsher climate and deteriorating rangelands. Now their experiences have converged in Ulaanbaatar, where the caravan’s final leg coincides with the opening of COP17 of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Governments, scientists, financial institutions, businesses and civil society have gathered there to address the pressures on the world’s drylands.

The journey has brought an old question into the spotlight: can global efforts to restore rangelands succeed without the knowledge of the people who have managed them for generations?

Delegates in traditional attire gather at the UNCCD COP17 venue in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on Aug. 17, 2026, as the conference brings together pastoralists, Indigenous representatives and policymakers to discuss land degradation, drought and rangeland restoration. Credit: UN photo

For centuries, caravans travelling the ancient Silk Road carried goods, ideas and cultures between distant civilisations. This one has carried stories of communities trying to keep up their land productive and their livelihoods intact as drought and degradation spread across drylands from Eurasia to Africa.

Its arrival on the eve of COP17 highlights the conference’s challenge of turning commitments to land restoration into action on the ground.

Land Degradation

Land degradation and drought cost the global economy USD 900 billion annually and affect 40% of the world’s land and 3.2 billion people. Droughts have increased by almost one-third since 2000 and generate at least USD 300 billion in annual losses, according to UN data.

For Tanzania’s pastoralist communities, Neema Seki, an Indigenous women and youth advocate connected to the Pastoralist Women’s Council, urged world leaders in Ulaanbaatar to guarantee land security for pastoral communities.

“The most rapidly changing aspect is access to land. This by implication affects everything else in pastoral livelihoods. Without land tenure security, livestock health is impacted, mobility is affected, and family food security is affected,” she told IPS.

Her warning is central to the COP17 debate as land degradation increasingly threatens pastoralist women’s rights, livelihoods and mobility.

“In a pastoralist setting, women play a significant role that is oftentimes not stated. If livestock health deteriorates, women are mostly responsible for feeding them, bringing water from far distances to water the ailing or weak livestock,” Seki said.

She added that restrictions on pastoral livelihoods can also create a gendered burden that national climate and conservation policies rarely capture.

“Another aspect is a reality that when the pastoral livelihoods are dismantled by restrictions on access to resources, women oftentimes remain in the land to suffer while men are able to go into cities to look for work while women remain with children at home.”

Mongolian ceremonial guards stand beside the national flag during the opening of UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar on Aug. 17, 2026. The conference is focused on accelerating global action on land restoration and drought resilience. Credit: UN photo

That experience is echoed thousands of kilometres away in Niger, where Abarchi Harouna, a pastoralist leader with the association Nodde Nooto and co-chair of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists for West and Central Africa, argues that mobility itself is an environmental management tool.

“Mobility is essential to pastoralism because it allows livestock keepers to search for water, pasture and salt wherever they are available,” Harouna told IPS.

For nomadic pastoralists such as Tanzania’s Maasai, restricting traditional migration corridors directly affects livelihoods.

“When governments restrict access to traditional routes and water points, nomadic pastoralists are deprived of pasture, water and salt,” he said.

“This can lead to a pastoral crisis, with significant livestock deaths and even conflicts between farmers and herders.”

Relevance in Mongolia

Similar pressures are evident in Mongolia, where pastoralism is key to the economy, yet nearly 77 percent of the country’s land suffers from degradation. Rangelands cover about 70 percent of its territory and support the livelihoods of roughly one-third of the population, leaving pastoral communities exposed to climate shocks.

Rangelands cover 54% of the Earth’s land surface, support about 2 billion people and provide nearly 70% of global livestock feed and one-sixth of the world’s food. Yet up to half are degraded, particularly in dry regions facing mounting climate pressures.

Harouna challenges a persistent narrative that pastoralism itself is responsible for land degradation.

“Livestock keepers are never responsible for land degradation. This narrative is incorrect. Livestock mobility ensures the health of pastures.”

He points instead to the ecological functions performed by mobile herds.

“Animals carry the seeds of grasses and woody plants from one place to another, thereby enriching biological diversity.”

Manure, he said, fertilises soils, while trampling can loosen compacted ground.

“The knowledge of livestock keepers helps governments and all stakeholders restore degraded land and improve resilience to climate change.

For Seki, a similar knowledge system exists in Tanzania but is increasingly undermined by government policies.

“One of the greatest traditional knowledge practices by pastoralists which is being wrongly discouraged by government policies is pastoral mobility,” she said.

The implications extend to a younger generation that, despite the pressures, has not necessarily abandoned pastoralism.

“Young pastoralists still see pastoralism as the best livelihood system. They are, however, daily confronting the ugliness caused by state-restrictive policies and the climate crisis,” Seki said.

The Economics of Waiting

COP17 organisers are seeking to frame restoration not just as an environmental obligation but also as an economic investment.

The conference estimates that about USD 355 billion is needed every year to combat land degradation and drought, compared with the current investment of roughly USD 77 billion. That leaves an annual financing gap of USD 278 billion.

The private sector currently contributes only around six percent of global finance for land restoration and drought resilience.

Closing that gap will be central to the negotiations.

The conference will explore ways of reducing investment risks and encouraging businesses, financial institutions and governments to finance regenerative landscapes. An initiative linked to the COP has recorded commitments of more than USD 9 billion across more than 210 million hectares.

The argument for investment is strengthened by the potential returns: every dollar invested in drought resilience can generate returns of up to USD 10, while some nature-based solutions can generate benefits many times their cost.

UNCCD Executive Secretary Yasmine Fouad has described the challenge bluntly: “The world does not lack solutions; the challenge is taking them to scale.”

From Commitments to Measurable Results

Mongolia’s Prime Minister N. Uchral has called for a shift “from talk to action, from targets to implementation, and from commitments to measurable results”.

The conference comes at a time when multilateral cooperation faces pressure and the world’s environmental crises grow increasingly interconnected. Land degradation affects food production. Drought intensifies water insecurity. Loss of vegetation contributes to biodiversity decline. Livelihood losses can drive migration and deepen competition over scarce resources.

As the first of the three Rio Convention COPs being held in 2026, COP17 offers an opportunity to connect land policy with negotiations on biodiversity and climate change later in the year.

It is also taking place during the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, giving pastoral communities a prominent place in the global policy calendar.

Seki argues that women and young people should be recognised as custodians of knowledge and resources.

“Women and young people play a great role in the pastoral system. This role extends to forest stewardship and resource management.”

Yet, she said, traditional knowledge often gets sidelined.

“Both women and young people are discouraged by state policies and conservation policies from using traditional knowledge for ecology and nature sustainability.”

COP17’s agenda includes a proposed policy framework on rangelands and pastoralists and the launch of a Rangelands Flagship Initiative aimed at attracting long-term investment into sustainable rangeland management and pastoral livelihoods.

For Harouna, restrictions on livestock mobility potentially affect agriculture, pastoral production and the environment. He warns that declining soil fertility could trigger dismal crop yields, while degraded grazing areas could foster invasive pests, consequently affecting livestock and reducing milk and meat supplies.

Exchange of Knowledge

The Silk Road Caravan’s final journey across Mongolia will take participants from the Gobi Desert to the country’s central forests and grasslands. They are expected to meet nomadic herder families, researchers, local authorities and pastoral cooperatives and visit restoration projects.

The challenge for delegates is to ensure the caravan’s lessons continue beyond the conference.

For dryland communities in Tanzania, Niger and Mongolia, restoration can determine whether livestock survive, families remain on their land, food production continues and ecosystems endure.

As the conference opens under the theme “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope”, its success may depend on whether the afflicted communities living on vulnerable landscapes receive the space, resources and recognition they need to restore and manage them.

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Credit: Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Aug 3 2026 (IPS)

Earlier this year, I called publicly for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining, arguing that it is not a rejection of progress, but a commitment to sound science.

I made that appeal because I believed governments meeting this year at the International Seabed Authority (ISA) would finally choose caution over haste. Watching the results emerge from Kingston, Jamaica, over these past weeks, I must admit to real disappointment.

But I want to be equally clear: disappointment is not defeat, and there is still every reason for hope.

The 31st session of the ISA concluded its work in Kingston with the Council ending two weeks of negotiations on 24 July without adopting the long-debated Mining Code. Unresolved issues, ranging from environmental safeguards and liability to inspection, compliance and benefit-sharing, remain exactly that: unresolved.

Governments including France, Costa Rica, South Africa, Mexico, Germany, Palau and Brazil rightly insisted these gaps must be closed before any commercial mining is contemplated. That the Authority could not bridge them after fifteen years of negotiation tells its own story about how far science and governance still lag behind commercial ambition.

James Alix Michel

That pressure has an external source too. The United States, which is not a party to the Law of the Sea Convention and sits outside the ISA altogether, has continued to advance its own unilateral licensing process for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the vast Pacific seabed that holds the largest concentration of exploration contracts on Earth. Five applications are already on record, with reports suggesting more may follow. When a single state can simply step outside a multilateral framework and issue permits for a shared global commons, it does not just threaten the ocean floor; it threatens the very idea that humanity can govern anything collectively. That, to me, is Kingston’s deeper failure: not that a code went unfinished, but that the multilateral system protecting our common heritage was tested, and did not hold as firmly as it should.

And yet.

I have spent much of my life in rooms where the odds seemed stacked against the ocean, and I have learned that setbacks in these negotiations are rarely the last word. There is real cause for hope in what else happened in Kingston.

When four deep-sea mining companies sought observer status at the Assembly, dozens of governments pushed back, and the decision was postponed rather than rushed through. Vanuatu brought forward an agenda item on “Ensuring Adequate Scientific Understanding to Support Informed Decision-Making,” precisely the argument I have been making since earlier this year: that we cannot regulate what we do not yet understand. And crucially, the Council did not simply walk away. It agreed a roadmap for further work, inviting states and observers to submit written proposals on the outstanding issues by 1 October 2026. The door to a properly safeguarded process remains open. It has not been slammed shut.

Most encouraging of all is the growing number of nations refusing to be rushed. When I first raised this call earlier this year, more than 40 countries had already backed a moratorium or precautionary pause. Today that number stands at 45, including seven Pacific nations, alongside outright bans by France and by Palau and New Caledonia within their own waters. They are joined by more than 70 companies, 82 financial institutions representing some €24 trillion in assets, and over 900 scientists from more than 70 countries, all saying the same thing: we do not yet know enough to proceed safely.

This is not an anti-mining movement. It is a pro-science movement. Nobody serious is arguing that the world will never need these minerals, or that the seabed must remain untouched forever. What I am arguing, and what the evidence increasingly supports, is that decisions with potentially irreversible consequences for ecosystems we have barely begun to map should not be made under commercial or geopolitical pressure. Scientists directly observed less than a tenth of the size of Belgium’s worth of deep seafloor before these negotiations began. This year’s IUCN Red List found that 62 percent of molluscs known only from hydrothermal vents are now at risk of extinction, many of them identified within the last decade. We are still discovering what we might destroy, and we are only beginning to understand the deep seabed’s role in storing carbon and regulating ocean chemistry.

I say this as someone who has governed a small island nation whose entire future is tied to the health of its ocean. Seychelles did not treat marine protection and economic progress as opposing forces. Through marine spatial planning protecting thirty percent of our waters, and the world’s first sovereign blue bond, we showed precaution can be financed and delivered without halting development. That experience is precisely why I believe a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining is a down payment on progress, not a brake on it.

Small island developing states cannot afford to gamble with the ocean systems that feed us and anchor our economies. I say this with humility: Seychelles has banned deep-sea mining in its own waters under our Marine Spatial Plan, yet is not among the 45 nations formally backing the international moratorium. That gap between what we protect at home and what we champion abroad is one I hope Seychelles, and others like it, will now close.

So my message to fellow leaders, particularly across Africa and the small island states that depend most on healthy oceans, is this:

Kingston’s disappointment is real, but it is not the end of the story. Forty-five nations have already shown that caution and ambition can coexist. I urge every government that has not yet done so, especially those still weighing their position ahead of the October deadline for written proposals, to add its voice to that growing coalition. This is not about obstructing progress; it is about demanding the evidence that ensures whatever progress we make does no lasting harm to the seabed we all share. I also urge regional bodies, from the African Union to Pacific and Caribbean groupings, to adopt common positions, so no single small state stands alone against powerful commercial interests.

The common heritage of humankind deserves patience as much as ambition. Kingston reminded us how much work remains. It also reminded us how many are still willing to do it.

James Alix Michel is the former President of Seychelles (2004-2016), Founder of the James Michel Foundation and the University of Seychelles, and a global advocate for the blue economy, ocean conservation and climate resilience.

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Dominica's geothermal power plant. As Caribbean countries seek to reduce their dependence on imported fossil fuels, renewable energy remains a key pillar of the regional resilience agenda advanced by CARICOM leaders. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
GROS ISLET, Saint Lucia , Aug 3 2026 (IPS)

From wars that drive up fuel prices to supply chain disruptions, inflation and increasingly frequent climate disasters, Caribbean leaders say many of the forces shaping the region’s future lie beyond their control.

Their response, however, is not resignation.

Instead, leaders of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the region’s largest economic grouping, are pursuing a strategy built on strengthening the systems they believe they can influence, hoping to make one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions more resilient to external shocks. These include food and energy security, transportation, healthcare, artificial intelligence and regional trade.

At their recent summit in Saint Lucia, the leaders argued that CARICOM must be judged less by declarations than by whether regional cooperation improves people’s daily lives.

“Our discussions have been guided by one central objective, ensuring that CARICOM delivers results that people can see and feel in their everyday lives,” CARICOM Chairman and Saint Lucia Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre said as he outlined the meeting’s outcomes.

“Heads of government focused on the issues that matter most to the people of the region.”

Those priorities included the rising cost of living, food security, affordable transportation, disaster resilience and the challenge of building stronger economies in an uncertain global environment.

Leaders acknowledged that inflation in food, fuel, freight and electricity has largely been driven by global conflicts, supply chain disruptions and commodity price shocks, which small island economies have little ability to influence. While several governments have introduced temporary measures to cushion households, they argued that lasting relief will require deeper regional cooperation on transportation, consumer protection and trade.

“We will work together,” said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, who leads CARICOM’s work on the Caribbean Single Market and Economy. “None of us is omniscient, none of us has all the answers, and none of us are omnipotent as well.”

One of the summit’s most tangible initiatives was renewed work toward an affordable intra-regional ferry service, long viewed as critical to reducing freight costs, improving travel and strengthening food security. Leaders said the proposal would begin with a proof of concept using existing ferry capacity while governments harmonise regulations governing licensing, insurance and vehicle movement across borders.

The initiative complements CARICOM’s “25 by 2025 Plus Five” programme, which aims to reduce the region’s food import bill by expanding agricultural production and strengthening regional supply chains. Leaders argued that producing and transporting more food within the Caribbean would make the region less vulnerable to global disruptions.

Energy security emerged as another defining theme.

Prime Minister Terrance Drew of St Kitts and Nevis said that the Caribbean’s greatest vulnerability is not a lack of energy resources but its continued dependence on imported fossil fuels.

“We don’t have an energy issue,” Drew said. “We have an energy-harnessing issue.”

Pointing to the region’s abundant solar, geothermal, wind and wave resources, Drew said renewable energy offers perhaps the greatest long-term opportunity to stabilise Caribbean economies, reduce electricity costs and improve living standards.

“There’s nothing that can really stabilise our economy, or transform our economy, or deal with this constant up and down, like stabilising our energy sources,” he said.

Recognising that technological change will also reshape the region’s future, CARICOM agreed to establish a regional Blue Ribbon Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Leaders said the commission will develop regional guidance on AI, helping member states capitalise on its benefits while managing risks around jobs, privacy and ethics.

Climate resilience also remained central to the discussions.

Leaders reaffirmed their commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius while continuing to advocate internationally for the special circumstances of Small Island Developing States. They also advanced work on a regional insurance and reinsurance strategy aimed at improving financial protection for governments, businesses and households, as climate-related disasters become more frequent and more costly.

Historical justice remained firmly on the regional agenda. Leaders endorsed renewed efforts to advance CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice through closer engagement with the African Union, upcoming Commonwealth meetings and other international forums.

The agenda set in Gros Islet, Saint Lucia, has effectively set CARICOM’s agenda for the months ahead. From advancing ferry connectivity and renewable energy to strengthening food security, disaster resilience and artificial intelligence governance, the challenge now is implementation.

For Caribbean citizens, the measure of success will not be the number of declarations adopted but whether regional cooperation delivers tangible improvements in everyday life.

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The reef surrounding Namotu Island, Fiji, has experienced serious coral bleaching caused by increasing ocean temperatures. Credit: Beau Pilgrim / Climate Visuals

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Jul 23 2026 (IPS)

Every morning, as the Indian Ocean retreats from the reef off Zanzibar’s Jambiani village, Chiku Chande steps into the knee-deep lagoon carrying bundles of seaweed seedlings. Years of farming these waters have taught her about every channel and coral outcrop. But lately, the corals that once glowed in brown and gold have become chalky white.

“You don’t need anyone to tell you these changes,” Chande tells IPS. “We see it with our own eyes. The coral has lost its colour.”

Like many families in Jambiani, the 48-year-old grandmother depends on the reef. It shelters her seaweed farm from crashing Indian Ocean waves, supports fish stocks and brings tourists to the village. As the corals bleach and slowly die, she worries about the future.

Chande has watched the reef change year after year. Scientists say her observations mirror what is happening across the world’s tropical oceans.

Scientists long regarded El Niño – the natural warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean that disrupts weather patterns globally – as the main driver of mass coral bleaching

A new study led by Climate Central and published in Oceanography concludes that human-induced climate change has driven every global coral bleaching event over the past four decades. The researchers found greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the oceans so much that El Niño now acts mainly as a trigger rather than the root cause.

“Our study shows that without climate change, coral bleaching would be a rare and isolated event, and global mass coral bleaching simply would not occur,” says Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s chief programme officer and the study’s lead author.

2026-2027 projected bleaching risk map. A report published in Oceanography argues that nearly every global coral bleaching event over the past 40 years would not have occurred
without human-caused climate change. Credit: Oceanography

Corals bleach when unusually warm water forces them to expel the microscopic algae that provide most of their food and give them their vibrant colours. If temperatures quickly return to normal, corals can recover. But prolonged heat starves them and can kill entire reef ecosystems.

To determine how much of that warming came from human activity, researchers compared today’s sea surface temperatures with computer simulations of a world unaffected by greenhouse gas emissions. They then assessed whether bleaching would still have occurred under those cooler conditions.

Their analysis showed that every global bleaching event since 1998 – including those in 1998, 2010, 2014-2017 and the ongoing event that began in 2023 – required human-caused warming to push ocean temperatures beyond bleaching thresholds. Although El Niño coincided with many of those events, the study found they would not have become global bleaching episodes without decades of warming driven by fossil fuel emissions.

Women seaweed farmers in Zanzibar’s Jambiani village receive guidance while tending seaweed farms in the shallow lagoon, where warming seas have also left nearby coral reefs increasingly bleached. Scientists say human-caused climate change, rather than natural climate cycles, has driven every global mass coral bleaching event on record. Credit: Muhidin Michuzi

The findings have particular implications for Tanzania.

The country’s 1,400-kilometre coastline, which includes the reefs surrounding Zanzibar, Pemba and Mafia islands, supports fisheries, tourism and thousands of coastal livelihoods. Healthy reefs also protect beaches and coastal settlements by absorbing up to 97 percent of incoming wave energy, reducing erosion and storm damage.

As reefs deteriorate, fish populations decline, tourism suffers and coastlines become increasingly vulnerable to flooding and erosion.

Similar pressures are happening across tropical reefs worldwide. Although coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor, they support roughly a quarter of all marine species and generate an estimated US$2.7 trillion annually in ecosystem services through fisheries, tourism and coastal protection. The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network estimates the world lost about 14 percent of its coral between 2009 and 2018 as repeated marine heatwaves left reefs too little time to recover.

Recent ocean temperature records suggest the pressure is intensifying.

According to the Copernicus Marine Service, June 2026 was the warmest June on record for global sea surface temperatures, while marine heatwaves covered about 82 percent of the world’s oceans by the end of the month. Because the oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, marine heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, increasing the likelihood of coral bleaching.

The Climate Central researchers project that by 2028 human-caused warming will outweigh El Niño’s influence in every coral reef region worldwide. Bleaching, they say, will increasingly reflect persistently warmer oceans rather than unusually strong natural climate cycles.

Using the same attribution methods, the researchers also assessed bleaching risk during the developing 2026-2027 El Niño. They found that while the climate pattern could still trigger bleaching in some regions, human-caused warming would account for most of the risk, particularly in the southern Caribbean, the Pacific coasts of Central and South America, and parts of East and Southeast Asia.

Globally, the monthly average sea-surface temperature for the extra-polar ocean (60°S–60°N) was the highest for June, exceeding the previous record set in June 2024 by just 0.01ºC. This partly reflected the development of strong El Niño conditions in the equatorial Pacific, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Credit: ECMWF/Copernicus Climate Change Service

The study challenges the long-held assumption that bleaching is mainly a response to natural climate cycles. Researchers say bleaching can no longer be viewed as an occasional event linked to natural climate cycles; scientists say it is increasingly becoming a recurring consequence of steadily warming oceans.

“By isolating the effect of climate change, our study shows that the fate of reefs is closely tied to how much carbon pollution goes into the atmosphere. Protecting reefs from overfishing and pollution is very important. We need as many thriving reef areas as possible. Even during severe events, there are often pockets of coral that persist. These areas can be the source for recovery in the short and long term,” Pershing tells IPS

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, up to 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs could disappear by mid-century. At 2 degrees Celsius of warming, losses could reach 99 percent.

Chande does not speak in terms of climate attribution. She only knows the reef looks different from when she began farming seaweed. Researchers say the bleaching she has witnessed reflects a much deeper shift: oceans that have steadily warmed over decades because of greenhouse gas emissions.

“When I was younger, the corals were full of colour and fish,” she said. “Now everything looks white. I worry about what is happening to the sea,” she says.

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CIVICUS discusses land grabs and environmental damage linked to a luxury coastal resort project with Eva Kushova, Director of Destination Management Organisation Albania, a civil society organisation that supports sustainable tourism in Albanian destinations, seeking to preserve culture and nature while maximising benefits for communities.

Eva Kushova

What are the impacts of Albania’s foreign investment laws?

The Law on Strategic Investments was passed in 2015 to attract foreign investment and boost Albania’s economy. Its deadline has since been extended several times, most recently to 2027. In practice, it has become a vehicle for serious abuses. Unlike ordinary investment laws, it gives the state the power to expropriate private property on investors’ behalf, often at compensation well below market value. Some residents say they were forced off their land after refusing this compensation.

Despite the law’s stated purpose, only two of around 44 projects approved so far are genuinely foreign investments. Most are owned by domestic investors with close connections to the government. The system gives selected companies access to public land, beaches, forests and national assets, and grants them tax exemptions for up to 10 years. The state also pays for all the necessary infrastructure, including electricity, roads, telecommunications and water, effectively subsidising private profit. In some cases, water meant for villages has been diverted to supply resort swimming pools. Meanwhile, local communities lose beach access and remain economically marginalised.

What does the Zvërnec case reveal about how these deals are made?

The Zvërnec project, a luxury resort planned on the coast near Vlorë, in southern Albania, comprising around 10,000 accommodation units, drew international attention because of its Trump family ties, but it exposed broader governance failures. It includes a large property allegedly acquired by an internationally wanted drug trafficker under highly questionable circumstances, and there are also allegations that officials manipulated property records at the regional land registry. Many local residents claim ownership of the property, yet it was suddenly recognised as belonging to the trafficker, who then sold it to Arab investors.

This fits a wider pattern in Albania’s land governance. After communism collapsed in 1991, the law mandated redistribution of agricultural land to rural families in small parcels. Thirty-five years on, most Albanians own only limited land, while strategic investors obtain vast coastal properties through questionable transactions, controversial expropriations and alleged manipulation of property records. Property rights have remained unresolved for over 30 years, forcing people into costly court proceedings.

The secrecy around the Zvërnec deal is typical too. The public only learns about the projects once construction machinery arrives on site. News of Zvërnec, and of Sazan Island, an island off Albania’s Adriatic coast earmarked for luxury development, broke via international media in March 2024. Even now, the identity and ownership of the investors behind several of these projects remain unclear, and sites are fenced off with barbed wire. Authorities say this is in preparation for infrastructure works, fuelling further distrust.

What environmental damage have these developments caused?

The Zvërnec coastline is home to the Narta Lagoon, one of Albania’s most biodiverse areas and a critical stopover for thousands of migratory birds travelling between Africa and Europe. It was first threatened by the construction of Vlora International Airport and now by the Zvërnec resort.

The legal groundwork was laid in 2022, when the government removed thousands of hectares from protected areas, cutting total coverage by 20 per cent. In 2024, another law opened the door to construction inside protected areas, allowing for the transformation of one of Albania’s last wild coastal lagoons into a heavily urbanised area. A further law passed in 2025 extended the threat to forests and pastures elsewhere in the country.

This runs counter to Albania’s European Union (EU) membership bid, targeted for 2030. All candidate states must align their laws with EU standards across 33 negotiating chapters before joining, and chapter 27 covers environmental protection. The European Commission’s 2025 Enlargement Report raised serious concerns on this front, criticising recent legal changes for weakening environmental standards. The Bern Convention’s Standing Committee, an international body that protects European wildlife and habitats, has repeatedly asked Albania to suspend construction of Vlora International Airport inside the Pishë Poro–Narta Protected Area, which includes the lagoon, pending proper environmental assessment. So far these requests have gone unheeded. But sustained EU pressure could still force a repeal of regressive laws and the introduction of stronger protection for natural areas.

What has driven recent protests, and how has the government responded?

Protests began on 23 May in Zvërnec after the developer fenced off part of the beach with barbed wire. They intensified after footage emerged on 30 May showing private security guards beating a protester while police stood by without intervening. The movement spread to the capital, Tirana, the next day, then to other Albanian cities, Kosovo and diaspora communities abroad, becoming known as the ‘Flamingo Revolution’. Protesters have marched nightly since under the slogan ‘Albania is not for sale’, demanding the project’s cancellation and Prime Minister Edi Rama’s resignation.

What began as opposition to a single resort has broadened into a wider anti-corruption movement, with protesters citing grievances such as poor public healthcare. A nationwide protest on 10 June deliberately coincided with a national historic commemoration, joined by Albanians from the diaspora on five continents. Yet Rama has stayed defiant, arguing that the backlash has more to do with the Trump links than with the project itself.

There are encouraging signs of accountability, though. The Special Structure against Corruption and Organised Crime, an independent judicial body created in 2016, has opened an investigation into the 2024 legal changes that enabled the Zvërnec deal. Arrest warrants have been issued against around 20 businesspeople suspected of illegally obtaining land or permits linked to various projects. People hope public pressure will keep judicial investigations alive, ensuring accountability for abuses of power, environmental damage and property rights violations.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Albania: protesters and police clash at anti-corruption demonstrations; amendments partially decriminalising defamation criticised CIVICUS Monitor 22.Apr.2026
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An Indigenous community leader, Jackeline Mendoza Díaz, addresses participants during the webinar “Gold’s Dark Web: The Hidden Price of a Booming Market” on June 25, speaking about the devastating impacts of illegal and poorly regulated gold mining on Indigenous lands, forests and local communities. The webinar brought together community leaders, investigators, civil society organisations, financial experts and policymakers to discuss how soaring gold prices are accelerating environmental destruction, organised crime and human rights abuses. Credit: FERN

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Jul 17 2026 (IPS)

The sweltering heat inside a London conference hall did not deter Indigenous leader Jackeline Mendoza Díaz from condemning the sheer destruction of the Peruvian Amazon. Her voice occasionally trembled with emotion but delivered a strong message — painting a picture far removed from the glittering gold bars traded in the world’s financial capitals.

Behind the rising price of gold, she said, lie poisoned rivers, razed forests and Indigenous communities jostling to defend their ancestral lands from the rising wave of illegal mining.

In her Asháninka community, she said, rivers that once sustained life no longer provide edible fish. Women trek for hours searching for clean water, while community leaders who speak out against encroachment increasingly do so at personal risk.

“Our rivers are being contaminated with mercury. When the rivers are contaminated, the fish become contaminated as well, and we indigenous people depend on these rivers for our survival,” Díaz told participants during a webinar that brought together Indigenous leaders, environmental advocates, investigators, bankers and policymakers to discuss the growing crisis of illicit gold.

Her testimony offered a glimpse into a global phenomenon that experts say is accelerating, as gold prices fuel environmental destruction, organized crime and corruption across continents

Behind the soaring value of gold lies a darker reality, visible in remote forests, fragile river systems and marginalised communities globally.

A recent report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) warns that illicit gold has become one of the world’s most consequential criminal markets, functioning as an “accelerant economy” that fuels conflict, corruption, environmental crime and organised criminal networks worldwide.

The report says rising gold prices have enabled criminals to control entire supply chains.

For nearby communities, the consequences are dire.

“We are defenders of the forests and defenders of life. Yet because of this, Indigenous defenders are often attacked, and many of us are even killed for protecting our people, our territories and our way of life,” said Diaz.

Forests Falling, Rivers Dying

In Ghana, where illegal mining has become a national crisis, environmental campaigner Daryl Bosu described a country caught up in a moral dilemma to balance the worth of the precious metal with environmental woes.

“Ghana is Africa’s largest gold producer, and gold remains one of the most important pillars of our economy,” Bosu said. “However, alongside these economic benefits, we have witnessed an alarming increase in illegal and poorly regulated mining activities.”

The environmental consequences, he warned, have been severe.

“Many of our forest reserves have suffered extensive degradation. Rivers and water bodies that serve millions of people have become heavily polluted.”

Across gold-producing regions, forests are rapidly being cleared to dig mining pits, roads and processing kilns. Once mining begins, toxic substances often contaminate rivers and groundwater aquifers.

According to the GI-TOC report, illicit gold mining frequently paves the way for illegal logging, wildlife trafficking and land grabbing. Dirty money is increasingly being invested in cattle ranching that destroys critical forest ecosystems.

Mercury’s Silent Toll

While deforestation often captures public attention, experts say mercury pollution remains one of the most devastating but least visible consequences of artisanal and small-scale gold mining.

Speaking exclusively to IPS during the recent Global Environment Facility (GEF) Assembly in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Monika Stankiewicz, Executive Secretary of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, warned that mercury contamination continues to threaten millions of people living in mining communities.

“Mercury contamination does not stop at the mining site,” Stankiewicz told IPS.

“It enters rivers and ecosystems, affecting fish, soil and water sources locally.”

For families dependent on fishing and farming, the consequences can be profound.

“Reduced food safety and food security, loss of income from contaminated natural resources, and long-term degradation of ecosystems they depend on,” she explained.

Mercury exposure can trigger neurological damage, memory loss, tremors, respiratory illnesses and reproductive health complications. Children are particularly vulnerable.

The impacts extend far beyond mining sites themselves.

Mercury released into the environment can travel vast distances through atmospheric circulation. Indigenous communities in the Arctic, for example, are experiencing mercury contamination despite having no mercury-intensive mining activities in their territories.

Following the Money

Yet environmental damage represents only one side of the illicit gold equation.

Several participants stressed that illicit gold is fundamentally a financial crime issue.

Julia Yansura, programme director, Environmental Crime & Illicit Finance, FACT Coalition, said billions of dollars earned through environmentally damaging mining activities continue to enter legitimate financial systems without scrutiny.

“What we are discussing today is not merely an environmental issue,” she said. “It is also a financial crime issue.”

Traditional responses have focused heavily on police raids and military operations targeting miners.

But according to Yansura, such interventions often fail because they focus on low-level actors while leaving intact the financial networks that sustain illegal mining.

“A more effective approach would focus on following the money,” she said.

The GI-TOC report supports that assessment, warning that criminals increasingly control entire gold supply chains.

The report also identifies growing use of cryptocurrencies and gold-backed stablecoins as emerging mechanisms for laundering illicit proceeds outside traditional anti-money laundering frameworks.

London’s Hidden Role

Much of the webinar focused on the responsibilities of major financial centres.

A coalition of 35 civil society organisations has urged governments gathering at the UK Illicit Finance Summit to recognise that gold has evolved beyond a commodity into what they describe as a strategic vehicle for organised crime, sanctions evasion and corruption.

The coalition notes that London remains the world’s largest over-the-counter gold trading hub, handling approximately 70 percent of global OTC gold trading volumes.

Because illicit gold frequently passes through multiple countries and refineries before reaching financial markets, campaigners argue that financial centres can no longer treat illegal mining as a problem confined to producer countries.

“The solution cannot come only from mining countries,” Yansura said. “It must also come from the financial centres where profits are ultimately laundered and legitimated.”

The coalition is calling for mandatory due diligence requirements, stronger beneficial ownership transparency, enhanced scrutiny of gold traders and robust anti-money laundering obligations across the entire gold supply chain.

A Crisis Outpacing Regulation

Sophia Pickles of the GI-TOC warned that existing international frameworks have failed to contain the evolving nature of illicit gold markets.

“There has undoubtedly been progress,” she acknowledged. “However, our recent research shows that criminal activity linked to gold mining is expanding.”

According to the GI-TOC report, voluntary responsible sourcing standards are insufficient against increasingly sophisticated criminal networks. Information gaps, weak customs oversight and opaque financial transactions continue to provide opportunities for illicit gold to enter legitimate markets.

Researchers argue that current approaches remain too narrowly focused on artisanal mining and conflict zones while overlooking broader vulnerabilities embedded throughout global supply chains.

Among the report’s key recommendations are legally binding due diligence requirements, stronger oversight of international bullion centres, mandatory transparency measures and enhanced scrutiny of financial institutions.

Searching for Solutions

Despite the scale of the challenge, Stankiewicz believes progress is possible.

Under the Minamata Convention, countries with significant artisanal and small-scale gold mining sectors are required to develop national action plans aimed at reducing mercury use and protecting communities.

The results, she says, are encouraging.

Countries are increasingly adopting mercury-free technologies, strengthening regulations and formalising parts of the mining sector.

Beyond the Gold Rush

As the webinar drew to an end, panellists emphasised that illicit gold is not just a mining issue but an environmental, health, governance, human rights and financial crime crisis.

For Mendoza Díaz and communities living on the edge of gold extraction, the message was crystal clear.

“We are not just defending our land and our territories; we are defending life itself and our ecosystem.”

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A child's painting of a fawn at the Conference Centre of Samarkand, where the Eighth GEF Assembly was held last month. The Bukhara deer, a species once pushed to the edge of survival by habitat loss and poaching, are now protected and introduced to the Zarafshan National Nature Park. Credit: ISD/ENB | Danny Skilton

By Kizito Makoye
SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Jul 7 2026 (IPS)

For most of the Eighth Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Assembly last month, the atmosphere inside Samarkand’s sprawling Congress Centre echoed a growing confidence of global environmental policymakers.

Delegates darted between plenary halls and side events discussing biodiversity targets, climate adaptation and ecosystem restoration. PowerPoint charts displayed shrinking forests. Investment bankers touted new financing tools. Smartly dressed bartenders served coffee in perfect air-conditioned comfort.

Yet despite this spectre of environmental diplomacy, a hard question lingered: How to mobilise private money when public coffers can no longer provide?

To many, the answer was blended finance.

The question became even more tangible on a humid Saturday morning when a group of delegates boarded low-emission coaches to Zarafshan National Nature Park on the outskirts of the ancient Silk Road city.

The excursion, many delegates later affirmed, offered a glimpse of a successful conservation model.

Walking through one of Central Asia’s surviving tugai forests – a riverside ecosystem that once stretched across much of the region – delegates witnessed the recovery of the Bukhara deer, a species once pushed to the edge of survival by habitat loss and poaching.

Wide-eyed delegates watched as rangers briskly hurled bundles of fresh forage, while several deer emerged from the reeds with the ease of animals that had learned to trust their caretakers.

A ranger works in an enclosure at the Zarafshan National Natural Park, one of Uzbekistan’s newest protected areas established to conserve the fragile riparian forests of the Zarafshan River and recover threatened wildlife, including the iconic Bukhara deer. The park illustrates the type of landscape where blended finance could help bridge funding gaps for ecosystem restoration, sustainable tourism and community livelihoods, provided investments deliver measurable conservation outcomes. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

For conservationists, the scene was a tangible sign of ecological recovery in a parched Uzbek steppe. For financiers, it carried a different meaning—evidence that restoration requires sustained investment long after donor attention has shifted elsewhere.

That tension – between ecological reality and financial logic – ran through nearly every conversation in Samarkand, where the GEF’s Eighth Assembly signalled a deeper shift toward blended finance as a core conservation funding model.

The GEF’s new replenishment cycle, dubbed GEF-9, will secure at least $3.9 billion in donor commitments through 2030. But the more consequential shift lies in its architecture, with a target of using roughly a quarter of the resources to crowd in private capital alongside public and concessional finance.

GEF officials explain that the institution’s approach differs from other blended finance initiatives by targeting only investments where markets have clearly failed.

“It is worth stating clearly at the outset that GEF’s own approach to blended finance has been deliberately targeted and highly catalytic,” Avril Benchimol, Senior Blended Finance Specialist at the GEF, told IPS. “By design, GEF’s concessional resources have been directed at transactions where market failure is demonstrable – frontier areas such as circular economy, nature-based solutions, conservation finance, and sustainable agriculture in challenging markets where private capital does not flow without a catalytic push.”

Samuel Wangwe, senior researcher at the Economic and Social Research Foundation, said this shift towards more blended finance initiatives reflects a broader transformation in development thinking.

“Blended finance is essentially an attempt to stretch scarce public resources further by bringing in private capital. That logic is understandable in today’s fiscal environment, but it does not remove the underlying development constraints that many countries face,” he said.

The logic is rooted in a fiscal reality widely acknowledged across development finance institutions: public budgets are insufficient to meet global environmental needs, with annual financing gaps for biodiversity and climate resilience running into hundreds of billions of dollars.

Blended finance is intended to bridge that gap by using public capital to absorb early-stage risk, improving the risk-return profile of projects that would not be viable for commercial investors.

A park ranger guides delegates through one of Uzbekistan’s protected landscapes, explaining ongoing conservation and restoration efforts. The visit highlighted how long-term biodiversity protection depends not only on strong environmental policies but also on innovative financing mechanisms capable of attracting private capital while safeguarding public conservation objectives. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

But Wangwe warned that the effectiveness of this model depends heavily on institutional strength.

“You cannot financialise ecosystems without strong governance systems. Where land rights are unclear or enforcement is weak, the risk does not disappear—it is simply priced differently, often at a higher cost to the country.”

The timing reflects broader strain in global public finance. Many donor governments face rising debt burdens, domestic political pressures and competing priorities from defence to healthcare. Development assistance budgets, once expected to expand alongside climate commitments, are instead substantially shrinking.

In that constrained environment, multilateral institutions are under pressure to demonstrate leverage – how much private capital can be mobilised per unit of public spending. As a result, blended finance has shifted from a niche development tool to a central pillar of environmental action, offering policymakers a politically palatable narrative: scarce public funds are not being reduced, but multiplied.

Wangwe, however, cautioned against over-reliance on this narrative.

“There is a tendency now to focus on how much money can be leveraged, rather than how effectively institutions can absorb and manage that investment. But without institutional depth, leverage becomes a hollow metric.”

GEF argues that its own experience suggests carefully structured concessional finance can mobilise substantially larger private investment than broader market averages.

“The concern about additionality is legitimate at the system level, and GEF takes it seriously as part of the broader conversation,” Benchimol said.

“GEF’s own mobilisation ratios have consistently outperformed the [market] average, in part because of the deliberate application of a minimum concessionality principle—using only as much concessional support as is necessary to make a transaction viable, and no more.”

Yet the promise of scale masks a more selective reality. Institutional investors – pension funds, insurers and asset managers – do not allocate capital based on environmental urgency. They respond to predictable revenue streams and manageable risk.

That distinction matters. Renewable energy projects increasingly fit that profile, offering long-term contracts and stable cash flows. Many conservation activities do not.

Ecosystem restoration, biodiversity protection and watershed management often generate public goods that are difficult to monetise. A restored forest may reduce carbon emissions and stabilise rainfall patterns, but it does not always produce direct financial returns.

As a result, blended finance works best where environmental projects can be partially ‘financialised’ – through carbon credits, ecotourism revenues or infrastructure-linked returns. Pure conservation projects remain harder to structure in bankable form.

Nowhere is this mismatch more visible than in Africa. The continent holds some of the world’s most critical biodiversity assets, from the Congo Basin to East Africa’s savannahs, yet continues to attract a relatively small share of global private environmental finance.

Contrary to common assumptions, the binding constraint is not global liquidity. Trillions of dollars sit in institutional portfolios seeking yield.

As Wangwe put it, “Africa is not short of opportunities. It is short of bankable structures that meet investor expectations. That gap is not technical alone—it is institutional and political.”

The result is a structural imbalance: countries with stronger institutions attract disproportionate flows of blended finance, while those facing the most severe environmental degradation remain dependent on grants and concessional funding.

GEF acknowledges that imbalance remains a genuine weakness of blended finance globally.

“The GEF fully shares the concern that blended finance instruments have not always reached the countries and communities with the greatest need,” Benchimol said.

“The concentration of blended finance flows in middle-income and relatively more bankable markets is a documented challenge, and addressing it is a priority as GEF shapes its future programming.”

This dynamic brings governance to the centre of the debate. Blended finance does not eliminate institutional risk; it re-prices it.

Guarantees, first-loss capital and concessional tranches can improve project economics, but they cannot substitute for credible legal systems or stable regulatory frameworks.

In practice, blended finance tends to cluster in environments where governance already functions relatively well. Where institutions are weaker, transaction costs rise and investor appetite declines.

That creates an uncomfortable implication: the places most in need of environmental investment are often the least able to attract it.

Wangwe added that this dynamic risks deepening inequality in conservation finance.

“If local communities are only seen as beneficiaries rather than stakeholders in financial structures, then blended finance risks repeating the same extractive patterns we have seen in other sectors, just under a greener label.”

GEF says future financing models must become far more country-led.

“Equity in blended finance requires genuine country ownership and voice—ensuring that recipient governments are partners in the design of financial structures rather than passive recipients of externally defined solutions,” Benchimol said.

Beyond technical design lies a more political question: who ultimately controls environmental assets as they become financialised?

Blended finance structures distribute risk and returns among governments, investors and local communities. But those distributions are not neutral.

Critics warn that conservation could increasingly resemble an investment class, where financial returns flow outward while ecological and social costs remain local.

“There is a risk that conservation becomes an asset class without community ownership,” Wangwe said. “That would replicate extractive dynamics under a green label.”

Despite its market-orientated framing, blended finance does not reduce the role of public institutions. It reconfigures it.

Governments and development agencies continue to provide first-loss capital, guarantees, project preparation funding and regulatory support. Without these interventions, most blended-finance transactions would not be viable.

Public finance, in other words, is not replaced – it is embedded deeper in deal structures, even as its presence becomes less visible in headline figures.

Wangwe stressed that this reality is often overlooked.

“The idea that private capital will replace public finance is misleading. In reality, public money is doing more of the heavy lifting than the rhetoric suggests – it is just now embedded deeper in the transaction structure.”

That raises a critical risk: if public spending is cut on the assumption that private capital will fill the gap, the entire model could weaken.

Closing the assembly, GEF interim CEO Claude Gascon noted that the model relies on cooperation and shared purpose.

He stressed the GEF was built on the understanding that no one can meet global environmental challenges alone and that it brings together countries, conventions, IPLCs, civil society, the private sector, and other stakeholders to deliver global environmental benefits.

“We need banks, institutional investors, corporations, and innovators to engage at a fundamentally different level. We need them not only to finance transition but also to shape it responsibly. We need business models that reward stewardship, not short-term extraction; disclosure and accountability systems that value long-term resilience; and governance frameworks that make environmental performance central to business success. The private sector has extraordinary reach, influence, and ingenuity. But with that influence comes responsibility.”

Back in Zarafshan National Nature Park, the Bukhara deer eventually retreated into the reeds as the delegation prepared to leave. The moment was brief, almost incidental, yet it underscored a central contradiction in global environmental finance.

Capital can accelerate conservation outcomes. It can reduce risk, improve coordination and expand funding. But it cannot substitute for the institutional and ecological conditions that determine whether recovery endures.

As delegates returned to Samarkand, optimism about blended finance remained intact. So did its central uncertainty.

For Africa, Wangwe argued, the challenge is not simply attracting investment but building the systems that can sustain it.

“The real test is not the volume of private investment mobilised, but whether ecosystems are restored, livelihoods are protected, and institutions are strengthened enough to sustain those gains beyond donor cycles.”

Despite the uncertainties, GEF says it intends to deepen – not scale back – its use of blended finance.

“GEF-9 is targeting 25% of GEF Trust Fund resources for blended finance, signalling a deliberate scaling of this approach – grounded in the conviction that blended finance, when properly structured and targeted, is not a subsidy for investments that markets would have made anyway, but a catalytic lever for investments that would not have happened at all,” Benchimol said.

The success of GEF-9 will therefore not be measured by how much private capital is mobilised but by where it flows – and whether it translates into lasting ecological recovery.

Note: This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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