CARI Communiqué – UNCCD COP 16 – Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – 03 December 2024
Present in Riyadh, CARI and the Desertification Working Group (GTD), a multi-stakeholder platform of French civil society organisations committed to supporting and implementing the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), welcome France’s initiative to finally declare itself an “affected country”, thus joining the Annex IV countries of the “Northern Mediterranean” Convention.
Negotiated in 1992 in Rio and signed in 1994 in Paris, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification is the third of the “three Rio sisters” and was initially dedicated to Africa. For too long reduced by the international community to a minor environmental instrument with the pejorative term of “poor people’s convention”, this convention is nevertheless concerned with land degradation, i.e. 40% of the Earth’s land surface and the almost 2 billion people who live on it. This includes 52% of the world’s degraded agricultural land, which threatens global food security.
No civilisation in the world has survived the death of its soil.
French civil society organisations involved in monitoring the UNCCD since it came into force in 1996 have consistently called for more determined implementation of the Convention, effective and organised participation by civil society, and the essential contribution of science, particularly through the French Scientific Committee on Desertification (CSFD). They have worked nationally and internationally to initiate platforms and networks of stakeholders. The combined action of civil society organisations has been the driving force behind numerous initiatives and innovations in terms of civil society participation and contribution to the negotiations. The same is true in the countries themselves, in the field of implementation at the finest level of the territories and populations affected.
France has supported the work of the Convention from the outset, and has been innovative in creating a French scientific committee on desertification, which has supported research work, and has promoted an executive secretary. France has also supported the work of the organisations grouped within the GTD, whose ongoing cooperation with the public authorities is to be commended.
What was missing, however, was a clear positioning of our country as a full member of the international community, identified in one of the five annexes.
Following in the footsteps of other neighbouring Mediterranean countries, including Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey, which have long declared themselves to be “affected countries” under the Convention, France is putting an end to the “French exception” by placing itself on the same footing as the other countries on the Latin arc. The droughts and floods that affect these countries in the Mediterranean climate “hotspot” would be arguments in themselves to justify this.
But perhaps most importantly, it also affirms a less ambiguous sense of belonging to the international community, in line with the objectives of the Convention, including neutrality with regard to land degradation (SDG15.3). This is undoubtedly an act that also has symbolic value in an international context that divides rather than unites in a degraded multilateralism. Symbols are also important.