WWF: Landscapes of Life – a nature-positive global agenda to protect, manage and restore grasslands, savannahs and rangelands - Press Conference, UNCCD COP17

There we go, sorry. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Peter McFeely. I lead communications for food and agriculture at WWF. We're here today to showcase a multi-stakeholder action agenda for grasslands, savannas and rangelands that has been developed by over 70 organizations here at UNCCD. to look at how we can drive implementation and action on the ground in these vital ecosystems. And then we're also going to showcase some of the partnership platforms that are already in existence to drive that action. We have four speakers with us, Juan Campari, the global lead for food and agriculture in WWF, Xenia Scanlan, excuse me, the chief of communications, external relations and partnerships with UNCCD, Yoko Wantanabe, the Director for Environment at the Asian Development Bank, and Madam Badam, our country director in WWF Mongolia. So first I'll pass to Joao, who will kick things off for us. Thank you. And I'll just add as well, of course, there'll be question and answer opportunities for questions at the end after all four speakers.

Thank you very much, Peter. Good afternoon, everybody. Delighted to be here. you know, to talk about grasslands, savannas, rangelands, and also about the important partnerships that we at WWF have with many of the stakeholders, including UNCCD and ADB as well. So let me get going here. So I just like to remind everyone some important facts and figures about why we are focusing a lot on grasslands, rangelands, and savannas. These landscapes are generally overlooked. When you go around the pavilions, you will see everybody talking about these overlooked ecosystems or biomes, if you will. But these are important natural systems that generally do not get ranked as high as they deserve. in global policy agenda. So at this COP the facts have been pretty much well established but I'll repeat them anyway so that we can have the numbers before we even begin to say anything that we're going to be doing with grassland savannas arrangements. So these natural systems cover about 54 percent of our land on the planet. They host 80 percent of the world's agricultural productive land They sequester about 33% of the global, they have in stock about 33% of the carbon stocks. They are home to about 25% of the world's population. However, only 10% of them are legally protected. So oftentimes protection of other ecosystems, other natural systems like forest displaces conversion and production into grasslands, such as the case in Brazil, for example. I'm from Brazil and we have the Amazon and the soy being displaced to important places in the Sahara of Brazil. So this is not uncommon to happen. grasslands get converted at a very high rate for unsustainable food and agricultural production. And actually, their rate of conversion is four times the rate of conversion in forest. So let's keep that in mind as we go along. So it's quite clear to see why action is so desperately needed to deliver benefits for people, nature, and climate. Grasslands, savannas and rangelands truly are one of the greatest synergy points for multiple agendas in the Rio Conventions and beyond. And you can see lots of stakeholders coalescing around and converging around the need to protect, sustainably manage and restore them all over this convention here in Ulaanbaatar. as it is the most prominent solution for their protection, sustainable management, restoration, as I said, food and agricultural systems transformation is a must. We need to move from the business as usual way that food and agriculture is produced into a state of nature positivity. So we need to work with nature positive agricultural production, not only on grasslands, savannas, but everywhere that produces food. So Why is that? Because food and agricultural production drives about 70% of the biodiversity loss, are responsible for 33% of greenhouse gas emissions, 70% of water withdrawals, and so on and so forth. So applying or adopting nature positive agricultural practices will provide numerous benefits. and ensure that we not only halt degradation in rangelands, but that we rehabilitate soil health and restore ecosystem functions in areas that they have been suffering or have been degraded. Like grasslands, savannas and rangelands, food and agriculture has often been overlooked and underfunded. If we truly want to create impact, there must be an investment in these natural spaces, both financially and politically as well. The progress so far at COP17 on these issues with positive signals from negotiations was the launch of the Rangeland Flagship Initiative yesterday. I hope many of you have been able to witnesses the commitments that have been made. It's 1.2 billion US dollars pipeline of finance that was launched yesterday. This is really encouraging news for us. But as her Excellency Executive Secretary Yasmine Fouad said in the launch yesterday, for COP17 to be a COP of implementation, there must be involvement across all stakeholders, not just in negotiation rooms, as we heard, and not just from donors, but from everyone. Which brings me now to landscapes of life. Moving from commitment to implementation is the crucial next step. Over the weekend, it was Saturday and Sunday, WWF and Sustainable Fiber Alliance, we convened a gathering. and approximately 200 stakeholders from more than 70 organizations across the rangelands, savannas and grasslands community to react to what has been happening at COP17 and what we have been seeing on the ground in these landscapes over the past number of years. The event, uh, gathered scientists, policy maker, pastoralists and local communities, conservation and development experts, private sector representatives and financial institutions and together. we developed a shared agenda to protect, sustainably manage and restore these vital ecosystems. So I'm proud to formally introduce Landscapes of Life, a shared agenda for grasslands, savannas and rangelands. It's published, it was published today. And the shared agenda has five main key action areas. I will read them to you. Now, the first one actually, and there is no obviously particular order of importance across the five. So let me start with the first action item that we put in this collective document. It's to secure rights and ensuring local pastoralists are included in decision making. Action two is managing grasslands as a connected social, ecological, and productive systems. Action three is making sustainable rangeland management economically worthwhile. Four, using systemic indicators to inform management decisions. And action five is fixing policy fragmentation and creating the conditions for delivery. The unifying message that we put in the document was quite clear. It's that grasslands, savannas and rangelands need to be recognized and managed as productive, biodiverse, social and resilient landscapes. It is time for us all to move from recognizing the importance of these natural systems to changing how they are governed, financed and managed. We call on other stakeholders, including parties to UNCCD, to scale investment and resources to drive positive benefits to nature, climate and people. But what is more important is that the organizations that have co-developed these agendas are committed to implementing and driving impact on the ground. And that's where the focus is right now. Now, we At WWF, our work on grasslands, rangelands, and savannas span across about 17 countries that we have engaged. WWF works in more than 100 countries, and almost 20 of them are engaged in the work and implementing action on the ground in this natural system. So our goal is to double the area under protection and sustainable management while supporting community-led restoration and ensuring equitable sharing of benefits. derived from ecosystem service and nature-based solutions. Our partnerships, WWF does not work alone, no one could work alone given the size of the challenge that we have ahead of us, but our partners are so crucial if we are to deliver that goal. We are in constant dialogue with more than 300 organizations, but I want to highlight how we are working with two of them, incredible partners that are here sharing this table, it's UNCCD, and ADB. It's an honor for us to be working alongside. Ever since the UN Food Systems Summit, which ended in 2021, WWF and UNCCD have worked close together. We are delighted to announce that we have formalized that partnership by signing an MOU to enhance cooperation and support the delivery of the UNCCD mandate. The MOU focuses on collaborative program design, joint resource mobilization efforts, capacity building to scale nature positive agriculture, jointly developing and promoting innovative financial mechanisms and working with the private sector at scale. Already we are seeing the benefits of this partnership. It enables us to develop very large programs. For instance, a significant 25 million US dollar proposal that we have been able to begin the mobilization and then the design of the project for work in Zimbabwe. I would also like to highlight how we are building a partnership with ADB to unlock funding that can restore grassland savannas and rangelands and deliver multiple conservation and development benefits. We are already partnering on the Nature Solutions Finance Hub and supporting the Mongolian COP17 presidency over the next two years. In addition, we are exploring many, many ways that we can implement these programs here in Mongolia and in other countries as well. So we are delighted to have this partnership with ADB. So just to conclude my remarks, as you probably are aware, WWF's mission is to build a future in which people and nature thrive in harmony. Food and agricultural systems transformation is one of the central pillars of delivering this mission. Given the rate at which agricultural and food production are converting nature and causing harmful impacts on nature and climate and people, If WWF does not work, would not work on food, we would not have a mission in the end. So this is how critical we place food and agricultural systems transformation at the core of our agenda, what we call the roadmap towards 2030. And the framework that we use for guiding our work on food and agriculture is called the nature positive approach in which we need to protect, natural habitats from further conversion to food and feed production. We need to sustainably manage the places that are producing food in land and water and also rehabilitate soil health and water systems that have been degraded so that we can have sustainable food production. Without much further ado, let me give you the word back to you, Peter, so that you can conclude this. Thank you very much, and thanks for our partners UNCCD and ADB that are sharing the table. Thank you.

Thank you, Joel. A lot of information there, but I'll now pass over to Zhenya from UNCCD.

Good afternoon and thank you so much Peter and thank you Joao for inviting UNCCD to be a part of this press conference and indeed we're very happy to be here on this stage with our very two important partners WWF and ADB. For those of you who might not know the secretariat of UNCCD is only about 80 people. with the global mandate and with 197 parties, 196 countries and the European Union who have signed the convention. So for a small convention secretariat, we can only achieve and advance our mission through partnerships. This is why for us, this is critical and essential for us to be able to translate what the decisions that are being made by the parties to the convention into implementation on the ground, which as we've heard is what is prioritized for this COP and the upcoming years, and to also give meaning to some of the decisions that are being made. And in particular, the partnership with WWF seeks to advance those two very key and critical decisions that have been made already at the Riyadh COP16 and which are again, being discussed here this week at COP17. The first one was already mentioned, that is on rangelands. And again, this is an incredible ecosystem and an incredible agenda that has really has come of age and here in Mongolia in conjunction with the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists is really where rangelands and pastoralists will be center stage of the discussions and it's so gratifying to see that through the initiatives such as the Rangelands Flagship Initiative and others that are being announced this is really taking shape both in terms of policy making but also implementation at scale And the second one again that was mentioned by Joao, and this is where our collaboration started, as you reminded us, is on the food systems. Again, the food systems is something that has a huge relevance for the climate agenda, for the biodiversity agenda, and of course, for the land agenda. For us, an important decision that emerged from COP16 was on the restoration of degraded agricultural lands. And here again at COP17, parties will be giving us further guidance on how they see this area being developed. But we know that through the food systems, we can certainly-- and we have no choice but to advance the dual objectives of really feeding the growing populations around the world while at the same time preserving the very natural resources that we require. And let me just also end by saying that we have been collaborating with WWF for a long time on many different topics, and it probably has taken us a little while longer to formalize this cooperation. It's actually quite interesting that it's only happened earlier this year, but we very much look forward to working together with WWF, ADB, and other partners. And we stand ready to support the important work of really translating the policy outcomes into action at scale across our 100 countries. in 96 countries and the European Union that are our parties. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Xenia. Yoko Watanabe, now I'll pass, please, to you.

Great. Thank you very much, Peter. And thanks so much for WWF for bringing us together for this press conference. and also of course UNCCD for really having this successful COP17 here in Mongolia and bringing all the 197 parties coming together at this juncture so really really appreciating and I have to say I have started my conservation and development career here in Mongolia WWF Mongolia so this is coming full cycle for me representing Asian Development Bank here as a partner working together so this is really really momentous for me as well and big, you know, to everybody. Um so just wanted to start by saying that this is really a momentum that every partner came together to bring in this action addenda together and as Daniel, you mentioned UNCCD, you know, really believes in partnership and ADB also of course believe in partnerships that you know, every partners have different strengths like technical strengths, finance, sort of bringing the finance and also scientific knowledge from the academia and the NGOs and others. We all really need to bring these actors together. So with that, you know, this is a really important initiative to bring forward together. And in terms of just the background, as some of them has been already shown by Joao, but the UNCCD's own assessment shows that there is a gap of 355 billion a year towards 2030 to really restore land and desertification targets. And currently, the level is still 77 billion, meaning that still around 300 billion a year is needed. So to close this gap, what ADB realized is that it's not a shortage of finance from the public and private sector in many reality. It is the bankable projects and how we invest in it is more the issue. And we need to do that in partnership as I started this conversation because no single organization can close this gap. And let me direct, you know, about where the constraint sits. So the capital is there, but being not being able to take the risk to invest in it. And what we really need is a concessional or a grant resources to do the needed assessment to bring the needed sort of financing structure and also develop a very strong viable investment portfolio and a project that others who are interested can invest in it. And enabling that, you know, we really need a platform and a support. So what we, Asian Development Bank have done is we built the Nature Solutions Finance Hub in 2033 at Climate COP28 in Dubai. And it targets is 5 billion to be catalyzed from partners. We, ADB, is already ready with a pipeline to support these initiatives, like working on watershed or working on forests, working on dry land and Also, range land management and bring in the needed capital, not only just from the public sector, but private sector, and we're aiming that, uh, this 5 billion sort of target can be achieved with our pipeline development. And what I really want to again emphasize is that this is ADB led, but this is a partnership between AFD, BMZ, GIZ, and EU as well, GCF and GF, and also OPEC fund and UK involved as financing partner. And financing partner can do one thing, bringing in the resource and catalyze other resources. But the very important thing is we have a very strong technical partners, and that's WWF and BirdLife, Conservation International, IUCN, Nature Finance, and TNC, the Nature Conservancy. And I have to emphasize here that ADB and WWF have been enjoying a 25 years of partnership starting in 2001, and we have been celebrating our long-term partnership this year as a 25-year anniversary. So this is really a momentous sort of initiative that we are moving forward. And finally, I want to inform again that yesterday our vice president announced the FIELD initiative. It stands for Financing Investments in Eradicating Land Degradation and Desertification. And what this does, this is a dedicated window to address dedicated land restoration and drought resilience and range land and dry lands in the region of Asia and Pacific. And we're targeting $2 billion for investment. We already have quite a strong pipeline in Central Asia and also in other countries. And we're finding that 15 bankable projects as a target to finance both women and men and have a strong participation and inclusive approach towards it. Second is Mongolia's initiative, and this is a legacy initiative for the COP17. ADB has been working on the IMAG and some rural development project, and we have established a fund dedicated for working on rangeland and grassland management. And because, as we were informed, 70% of Mongolia's rangelands are degraded, and we really need to take urgent action on it. So what we are trying to do is to develop this green investment and resilient agribusiness financing fund, the GIRAF. And this is 117.6 million fund that is bringing herders and cooperatives and micro enterprise and agribusinesses and support about 500 cooperatives and thousands micro enterprise working on rangeland grassland management together. So I just really wanted to emphasize that we are really looking forward to working and bringing the strength of definite organization. ADB is ready to take our own role to bring in the partnership and also our finance. both concessional as well as grant finance and also regular loan as well as policy lending. We also work and issued a biodiversity bond at the COP last time in biodiversity COP. We're also working on a nature credit and different mechanism that can help on this issue. So finally, to close, we really look forward to our further collaboration with WWF and UNCCD and many partners have joined to bring this action agenda further and looking forward to a further collaboration. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Yoko. So lots of talk about partnership, finance, implementation, and so I think it's fitting last but not least for Badam to talk to us about what that actually looks like on the ground here in Mongolia.

Hi. So, um, thank you very much. Uh, I'd like to start actually with, uh, the landscape of life, um, program or event that we have just held, you know, over the weekend. So WWF Mongolia was delighted to host this event and, uh, having the people, you know, partners, longtime partners together, uh, you know, um, discussing the, the, uh, the themes on how to protect, manage and restore grasslands and, uh, you know, dancing together, walking together to get to know the area, to get to know the Mongolian landscapes has been very fun and has been a very big achievement. And we were asked the team of 32, the WWF Mongolia team was delighted to hear the feedback from our partners and from our people that they were prepared, they felt prepared for this COP17 event, Water Talk, and they understand the objectives of the UNCCD, why they selected Mongolia, what the landscape is like, what the solutions and issues are. So we were happy about that. So now I would like to talk about the WWF Mongolia. So WWF Mongolia has been actually working over the past 30 years in cooperation with the government of Mongolia and our fantastic and amazing partners such as the UNCCD, ADB and other organizations. So we actually focus on three areas. Geographic scope of our approach is actually region, ecoregion based approach, landscape based approach. We are very inclusive. So we have selected actually two very important ecosystems, ecoregions. of global importance for biodiversity conservation. One is the Alta Syne in the west and the other region is actually Alta Amur Halon in the east. So western and Mongolian, western eastern Mongolia have been our target for to support the herders there, to support the livelihoods there, you know, to support wildlife and animals. So when we had our strategic document for the 2026 to 2030, we actually selected one more target area, which is the Gobi region, where we have super animals, Gobi's migratory species need to be protected there as of national importance. So we actually focus on three priority ecosystems I just mentioned and two species groups, you know, and wild cats and gobies migratory species. So this is about us, WWF Mongolia has been, has contributed to the taking the about 36% of the land under state protection. We're very proud, we're very science focused, you know, science based organization, whatever you do, we want to do it properly, you know, with accurate data and monitor and evaluation and everything as a whole. So if I have more time, I would like to give some examples, share some of the examples of our work on the ground about how we, what we did actually, or what we do about protecting the grasslands, protecting, restoring grasslands. So one example actually, I would like to cite as a very excellent cooperation with the government of Mongolia and also the FAO UN FAO we worked together to implement a very relevant project the name of the project is actually so promoting dryland lands sustainable Landscapes and biodiversity conservation in the eastern steps of Mongolia so this project was implemented in 2020 uh between 2021 to 2026 and the GF of our actually we were funded the GEF and the resource partners were us, the FAO and WWF. So we operated across nine zones in six nature reserves in the eastern Mongolia. So the objective was exactly the same, similar to what we are discussing here. So to reverse and prevent dryland ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss through an inclusive integrated landscape and value chain approach in securing the sustainable and resilient livelihoods in the eastern steppes of Mongolia. So we actually had four objectives, but I'd like to focus on two objectives. One was to strengthen the enabling environment for the sustainable management in drylands. and scale them up. So number one I would like to mention is that we had this integrated land management planning. So land management is the source of everything. If we are careful, we manage and are successful in this, then we can succeed in many of the other agendas. So we actually supported the land management plans at the state, the regional and some levels, and we integrated it. We made it so inclusive that the herder groups, the some governors, and everyone who were relevant in the land, they were included in the governance, and the governance was so much improved, and we actually came up with the methodology to do it, so had it approved by the relevant government authorities and had it ready to scale up. So this contributes to our agenda to have integrated approach to the land management. So we had different lands arranged in management. So we promoted the rest in rotational pastures for the land. And, you know, also another area we worked together is actually with our partners is strengthen the biodiversity conservation and landscape connectivity. So we actually thought that it was important to, now I'm going to be very specific in a few areas. So we actually introduced the innovative practice to reduce pressure on the pasture lands. So we had three models. One is the feed production at the winter campsites for herders. So they were encouraged to provide the feed, produce their own feed. And the second module was actually livestock feed production by the herder groups. We supported cooperatives to join forces together so they can be very efficient. for the production. And the third one is actually contracted, uh, farmers, you know, contract farmer solution to conflict, to resolve conflicts. So another, I wonder if I have time. Okay, so one more area just to specify what we do is like we actually identified 65 core habitats and 157 connectivity areas in the Eastern Mongolia under this project and they reflected them in the land use plan so that we would consider the needs of the wildlife for the linear infrastructure development and also for the better management of the lands. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Bada. Very inspiring work, and I think to see that impact. That's everything for our four speakers. We have a few minutes now, time for a couple of questions if anybody would like to ask anything of any of the four speakers. Okay. Well, in that case, I'd just like to close. Thank you all for coming and attending. Obviously, as an employee of WWF, I just read the mission that Joao expressed for our organization to build a future in which people and nature thrive in harmony. While that's sort of our language, I think it's really something that everybody sitting here is working towards. It's really a shared outcome that we're trying to achieve. And these levels and scales of outcomes can only be achieved through partnership. We're very, very proud and honored to be able to work with such impactful partners and to be able to deliver that scale of implementation and action on the ground here in Mongolia and in other countries all over the world. So thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.