IUCN Common Messages to the 2026 Rio Convention Conference of the Parties (COPs)
As Parties to the Rio Conventions – the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) – meet this year, they do so amid geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and an escalating planetary crisis.
The accelerating decline of nature’s living and non living components is now widely recognised, and its severity is increasingly clear. Yet uncoordinated, sector specific responses risk worsening biodiversity loss, for example through poorly planned renewable energy infrastructure, unsustainable bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, forest plantations using new or invasive species, climate and land degradation-driven human migration, or unproven geoengineering approaches.
These pressures are further compounded by developing El Niño conditions, which the World Meteorological Organization warns will disrupt global temperature and rainfall patterns and heighten extreme weather risks in the coming months (WMO, 2026). Such impacts will intensify biodiversity loss, climate change, and land degradation, disproportionately harming vulnerable communities.
With scientific understanding stronger than ever and the costs of inaction unmistakable, the 2026 meetings of the Rio Convention COPs offer a critical opportunity to use multilateral cooperation to confront these environmental crises decisively.
The Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Paris Agreement, and Land Degradation Neutrality targets reflect a shared international commitment to act. Progress has been made, but ambition and implementation remain far from sufficient to reverse current trends at the necessary pace and scale.
As 2030 approaches, when the Sustainable Development Goals and the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework should be achieved, IUCN urges Parties to intensify efforts and ensure the COPs deliver concrete outcomes rather than rhetoric, and strengthen mechanisms for implementation, monitoring, and accountability.
IUCN therefore presents its common messages for UNCCD COP17, CBD COP17, and UNFCCC COP31, taking place in late 2026. These messages complement, but do not replace, IUCN’s detailed positions and recommendations in the individual COP specific position papers.
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