From Ulaanbaatar to Yerevan: protection and restoration go hand in hand

Investing in land protection and sustainable management is the less expensive corollary to restoration. They are not substitutes for one another, but are mutually supportive when applied as local conditions, histories, policies and economies allow. The upcoming COP17 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Yerevan will be an opportunity to examine the role that nature and protected and conserved areas play in both biodiversity conservation and preventing land degradation.

CBD COP 17 marks the first global review of progress towards the 23 targets for 2030 set by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We have reached the halfway point for those 2030 targets and Target 3, the commitment to conserve 30 percent of the Earth’s lands and seas, will be under particular scrutiny at COP17. There has been progress in setting national targets but as yet limited evidence that implementation is moving at the speed the moment demands.

Rangelands and grasslands should be central to the achievement of Target 3. They cover roughly half the world's land surface, hold enormous stores of carbon in soil rather than biomass, and support hundreds of millions of pastoralist livelihoods, yet they remain badly underrepresented in the world's protected area network. The UNCCD and CBD COPs coincide with the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026, which puts rangelands squarely at the centre of the global conservation and sustainability agenda. 

The primary causes of rangeland degradation are clear: overstocking driven by subsidies that reward herd size over land health, demand for livestock products, and the lack of incentives for pastoralists and land managers to steward the resource sustainably. Fixing the incentives and protecting the key ecosystems and habitats can slow land degradation before it starts. The alternative is to pay for restoration, a process that is slower, costlier and less certain than keeping land healthy in the first place.

This not an argument against restoration; COP17 in Mongolia was right to put it front and center for the land already lost. It is an argument for treating protection and restoration as inseparable. Every hectare of rangeland that is not degraded is a hectare Yerevan won't need to count as a future restoration target.

Desertification, biodiversity loss and climate change, addressed by separate global agreements,  all trace back to the same underlying problem: land and nature that isn't valued, protected, or managed well enough to keep delivering for people and ecosystems alike. Protected and conserved areas are where the three Rio conventions meet, where sustainable land management stops being an abstraction and becomes tangible, on-the-ground progress toward the goals the global community has endorsed.

The throughline from Ulaanbaatar to Yerevan, then, isn't really about land and biodiversity as separate portfolios. It's about whether we are willing to invest in keeping nature intact — through PCAs that are effective, sustainably financed and locally rooted — before degradation forces our hand.