A Just Transition

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) and the G20 Leaders' Summit now concluded, attention turns to this week's gathering of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Panama. Whether the event delivers progress on sustainable land management and drought resilience in a just and equitable manner hinges largely on one familiar factor: finance.

- Andrea Meza Murillo is Deputy Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Bradley Hiller is Lead Climate Change Specialist at the Islamic Development Bank. @PROJECT SYNDICATE

Insufficient funding has emerged as a stumbling block in advancing multiple Sustainable Development Goals, with SDG15 - focused on the protection, restoration, and sustainable use of land and terrestrial ecosystems - receiving some of the lowest levels of finance. But human well-being, and progress toward many other SDGs, depends directly on healthy soil, water, and terrestrial biodiversity.

Already, up to 40 per cent of our planet's lands are degraded and deteriorating, jeopardizing the health and livelihoods of more than three billion people, especially poor rural communities, small-scale farmers, women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and other at-risk groups. Annual economic losses linked to desertification, land degradation, and drought amount to $878 billion - far more than the investments needed to address them. A just transition from an exploitative land economy to one that is restorative, inclusive, and resilient is urgently needed.

The concept of a just transition has become central to discussions on climate action - in particular, the energy transition. For example, it is understood that European communities dependent on coal production need support, so that they can secure good jobs in emerging clean industries. Globally, numerous initiatives have been created to support a just energy transition. But no equivalent exists for the land sector (which includes agriculture, forestry, and other land use), even though the need for a "just land transition" to support interconnected climate, nature, and human-development imperatives is at least as great.