After two weeks of negotiations, the seventeenth United Nations World Conference on combating desertification (Cop17) concluded in Ulaanbaatar. The summit, as reported by the international press and non-governmental organisations, was dominated above all by one country: the United States. Numerous points under discussion met with firm opposition from the delegation sent by the Washington government: during the discussions, objections were raised, for example, against all documents containing the words "climate warming". But on gender equality, migration and the rights of indigenous peoples too, the United States effectively prevented any progress. A strategy that also drew criticism from other delegations while discussions were still under way.

African countries called for a joint action plan on drought: they will try again in two years

The situation, at the close of Cop17, was so tense that some were even relieved by the mere fact that the negotiating process under the auspices of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (Unccd) had not broken down entirely, and that Cop18 will indeed be held, as planned, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in two years' time.

The upshot is that on one of the major issues linked to desertification — the waves of drought generated or exacerbated by climate change — it was not possible to reach an agreement. Exactly as happened at Cop16, held in Saudi Arabia in 2024, governments failed to agree on a joint action plan that would commit the entire world, as loudly demanded above all by African countries.

Some progress was made in this regard on the 2024 Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership, but it has not yet been possible to move to implementation. The Unccd Executive Secretary, Yasmine Fouad, was nonetheless forced to concede the impossibility of finding common ground: "The creation of a global instrument to combat drought will be revisited in two years." At the very least, the mandate for the same UN Convention "to continue its work" remains in place.

$1.3 billion pledged for 45 projects, but one billion a day would be needed

With great fanfare, the pledging of 1.3 billion dollars was then announced https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/29/cop17-in-mongolia-wraps-up-with-13-billion-dollars-of-green-investment-pledge for 45 land restoration projects across 23 countries. A figure that, however, appears to be a drop in the ocean, given that according to the Unccd itself, one billion dollars a day would be needed between now and 2030 to restore the world's degraded soils.

Even smaller in scale is the financial instrument launched by the Unccd and Luxembourg (the Drought Resilience Investment Facility), which aims to mobilise 400 million dollars in public and private funds to combat drought.

In practice, with rainfall shortfalls in some parts of the world set to be catastrophic due to the emergence of a particularly severe El Niño, after Cop17 all the questions posed by Executive Secretary Fouad herself remain unanswered: "Will countries be better prepared for drought in the future? Will degraded lands be restored? Will funding reach viable projects? And will people see a tangible improvement in their living conditions?"