Source: UNCCD website & live mint
Key highlights of CoP 14
- The UNCCD COP 14 ended on 13 September 2019, after ten days of meetings. The conference was hosted by India.
- With this CoP14 India will take over the CoP presidency from China for the next two years until the next CoP to be hosted in 2021.
- The Conference(196 members+European Union) adopted the Delhi Declaration in which parties expressed commitment for a range of issues, including gender and health, ecosystem restoration, taking action on climate change, private sector engagement, Peace Forest Initiative and recovery of five million hectares of degraded land in India.
- The participating countries also agreed that land degradation is a major economic, social and environmental problem, and welcomed the strengthening of the adoption of voluntary “land degradation neutrality” targets that include the restoration of degraded land by 2030.
- UNCCD COP14 agreed on 36 decisions to ramp up and elaborate further action on the ground to ensure that the Convention’s goals for 2018-2030 are achieved.
- Four takeaway messages of the conference;
- Land restoration is the cheapest solution to climate change and biodiversity loss
- Land restoration makes business sense if regulations and incentives to reward investment are in place
- Drought preparedness and response are critical in the face of climate change
- To put people first is to ensure gender balance, engage youth, secure land rights
The new UNCCD 2018-2030 Strategic Framework
The new UNCCD 2018-2030 Strategic Framework is the most comprehensive global commitment to achieve Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) in order to restore the productivity of the vast expanses of degraded land, improve the livelihoods of more than 1.3 billion people, and reduce the impacts of drought on vulnerable population to build a future that avoids, minimizes, and reverses desertification, land degradation and mitigates the effects of drought in the affected areas at all levels to achieve a land degradation-neutral world, consistent with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
It was adopted in Paris on 17 June 1994 and ratified by 196 countries & European Union. India ratified the UNCCD Convention on 17th December 1996. This convention can be called as “Mother convention” of the other two Rio Conventions that emerged as a major outcome of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit viz. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
