Ibrahim Thiaw: UNFCCC teams 'don't talk to each other'

At the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the offices of U.N. leaders were nestled between fresh white plywood walls in a side building which provided respite from the Sinai desert sun. A blue banner adorned with the slogan “#United4Land” hung outside the offices of Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Inside, there was a solitary desk, behind which sat Thiaw, who began his career as an official working on rural development in his home country of Mauritania.

Over the summer, Thiaw served as interim head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a position vacated by Patricia Espinosa and filled in August by Simon Stiell of Grenada. While his tenure was only a month, it exposed him to a classic governance problem within the U.N.’s main climate agency — a lack of coordination on different themes dealt with by large organizations, known in the global development wonk vernacular as “siloes.”

“We as civil servants, we have siloed so much, we actually call them pillars which are even worse, as pillars don’t touch each other … I think we need to reconsider that,” said Thiaw. He noticed during his spell running UNFCCC that the agency’s mitigation and adaptation teams “apparently don’t talk to each other.”

“When you put them together you say, okay, ‘can we have a program that will actually resonate with our decision-makers,’ because the minister or the president want to have an integrated approach. They don't want to have different reports on their desk,” said Thiaw. “Adaptation and mitigation are two good concepts, but they are interconnected, or they can be interconnected … I am not a fan of that separation.”

Thiaw said the U.N. system still views agriculture, water, and energy separately, but the areas are “not disconnected.” This is not just a feature of UNFCCC, according to Thiaw, but the broader approach to climate which treats mitigation and adaptation as separate agendas. “I think the time has come for the world to understand that these issues are all interconnected,” he said.  

Thiaw, for example, views renewable energy and economic development as central to good land management, which falls under the remit of the UNCCD. Poor land management, along with deforestation and drought, is what often causes the desertification of fertile lands in places like the Sahel region of Africa. Sand dunes, a key indicator of desertification, are expanding in some places by 15.2 square kilometers a year. Other studies have found that drylands could expand by 10% to 20% in the next 80 years, mostly in lower-income countries.

“We still continue to lose land,” said Thiaw, pointing out that three billion people across the world are affected by land degradation. “We have created scars on the face of earth … wounds that we need to heal. But where I'm optimistic is that I see a movement coming not only in the energy sector [the realm of mitigation, where renewable energy sources are growing fast] but also in the land use sector.”

Thiaw cited a number of land use projects: Saudi Arabia’s Middle East Green Initiative, the South Africa green deal, the Great Green Wall in the Sahel, and the 30 by 30 proposal to protect or conserving at least 30% of the world's land and ocean by 2030, which now has the support of 100 countries, and national initiatives by Mongolia and China.

“But these are essentially public sector investments. The shift will come when the private sector will also get involved,” said Thiaw. For him, this shift will mark “restoration 2.0.”

This change will only happen, Thiaw said, when private companies — whose work primarily in agriculture, animal feed, and cotton production is driving land degradation — “understand that it is in their best interest to stay longer on that land and invest in more sustainable land management and to stay for 100 years, 150 years before they consider moving to another place.”

The number of people who live in dry environments becoming more exposed to impacts like water stress is expected to reach 951 million even under the more conservative climate projection of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, according to the Special Report on Climate Change and Land by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But Thiaw said there was a need to “debunk the myth” that there is “no hope” in places hard hit by desertification like Somalia and the Sahel, where he said there was a “lot of business.”

So what might that long-term, more sustainable private sector investment to better manage lands and fight drought look like?

Fittingly for a COP, where renewable investments are much of the talk of the summit, sustainable energy is one of the main areas of dryland investment touted by Thiaw. The most energy-intensive solar power is soaked up by drylands, particularly around Lake Chad, he said. That sunshine also heats the soil, creating thermal energy. And a combination of these conditions mean green hydrogen is a prospect in some areas where there is also some access to water, with major investments slated for Namibia and Mauritania.

Finding effective land management techniques are crucial on a finite planet and Thiaw highlighted that the world’s population hit 8 billion during COP 27, and is predicted to reach 9 billion by 2050.

“So how far are we going to go?” he asked. “How many forests are we going to clear, how many water, rivers and so forth are we going to deplete before we finally realize that we have nowhere to go? We have nowhere to hide.”