From Dialogue to Delivery: What COP17 Means For Cgiar’s Multifunctional Landscapes Science

08 September 2026, Mongolia: At UNCCD COP17, a consistent message emerged from CGIAR-led discussions: many solutions to land degradation, drought and food insecurity already exist. The harder task is to connect them, finance them and put them to work at the scale landscapes and communities require. 

Over two weeks in Ulaanbaatar, CGIAR scientists joined governments, pastoralists, farmers, civil society, development organizations and financiers to examine how that gap can be closed. Discussions on water, rangelands, soil health, restoration finance and food value chains converged around one point: land degradation is experienced as a connected problem, but policy, research and finance still respond through separate mandates and projects. 

What transpires from COP17 

The negotiated outcome was important but uneven. IISD’s summary of the negotiations records 34 decisions, advancing work on rangelands and pastoralists, land tenure, agricultural soils, resource mobilization and the future of the Science-Policy Interface.  

Yet the official drought decision left a major question unresolved: whether to establish a global instrument on drought, potentially in the form of a protocol or another legally binding instrument, or to pursue a voluntary approach based on goals set by individual countries. For the second consecutive COP, Parties were unable to reach agreement on the way forward, leaving the issue to be taken up again at COP18 in Egypt 

Formal agenda items on gender, synergies among the Rio Conventions and the participation of indigenous people and other stakeholders  within the Convention could not be taken up for consideration at COP17, as Parties were unable to reach consensus on their inclusion in the agenda.  Despite the lack of formal agreement, these issues remained prominent throughout COP17, including in caucuses and high-level discussions IUCN’s closing assessment similarly described progress alongside unresolved issues requiring continued engagement. 

Rangelands and pastoralists were among the most widely discussed topics at COP17, both inside and outside the negotiating rooms. It was a defining priority for the Mongolian presidency and for the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026. The decision recognizes pastoralists as stewards of these ecosystems and pastoral mobility, including transboundary mobility — as a resilience strategy, while welcoming evidence on rotational grazing and community-managed pastoral commons as a buffer against drought and wildfire. It asks the secretariat and Global Mechanism to close evidence gaps on under-studied rangelands, build a pipeline of projects on food security, drought resilience and livelihoods, and improve tenure security in line with the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure. Progress is due back at COP18, a window CGIAR intends to help fill, generating the rangeland evidence, monitoring methods and investable project pipelines this decision calls for. 

This mix of progress and unfinished business matters for CGIAR. It shifts the question from whether integrated science is needed to where it can close specific implementation gaps before the next COP. This also calls for systems thinking, including bundling social, economic and ecological innovations to accelerate consensus on collective challenges and to move from commitments to actions. 

Solutions work best as connected bundles 

CGIAR sessions showed why the landscape is the right operational scale. In Spain, AlVelAl combines forest restoration, regenerative agriculture, water conservation, processing and local businesses. Examples from India connected organic cotton, agroforestry and local value addition, while work in Tunisia linked agroecology and an indigenous olive variety with farmer organisation, geographical indication and private investment. 

These show how ecological, social, market and governance solutions can reinforce one another when designed around a shared vision. CGIAR’s Landscape Vision-to-Action approach uses this logic: assess landscape conditions, agree priorities with the people and institutions who shape them, make trade-offs visible and build pathways that connect restoration, production, livelihoods and investment. 

Evidence and finance must meet 

This evidence challenge was closely linked to another question that ran through COP17 Finance Day: how to turn restoration plans into investments that can be delivered. At COP17, governments, development banks, funds and companies announced a US$1.3 billion portfolio of new and pipeline finance for land restoration and drought resilience. This included the Rangelands Flagship Initiative, valued at US$1.2 billion across 45 projects. The breakdown showed why the distinction between investment pipelines and deployable finance matters.  

Of the overall portfolio, US$644.5 million was identified as new finance, of which US$216.4 million was confirmed and moving towards implementation. Discussions in Ulaanbaatar therefore focused on project preparation, guarantees, first-loss capital and insurance as ways to move viable proposals forward. For CGIAR, this creates a clear role for science: helping partners develop credible landscape-level investment cases, establish proportionate evidence requirements and demonstrate how restoration can support water security, biodiversity, production and livelihoods. These approaches must remain accessible to small producers and community-led initiatives that conventional financing models often struggle to reach. 

What this means for CGIAR and Multifunctional Landscapes science 

The COP17 rangelands decision shows the Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program has a concrete research agenda. It calls for stronger evidence, practical guidance and project pipelines that improve food security, drought resilience, livelihoods and the participation of women and young people, while recognizing pastoralists’ knowledge and tenure. CGIAR is already responding by bringing rangeland ecology, livestock systems, water, mobility, tenure and value chains into the same research designs, and by using its Living Landscapes to test what works under different ecological and institutional conditions. Work such as Rangelands Rising can help connect that evidence to governance and investment. 

The lack of agreement on drought at COP17 increases the importance of the intersessional period for building the evidence needed to inform future negotiations and action. CGIAR can demonstrate proactive drought management in practice by combining early warning, anticipatory finance, integrated land-water planning, drought-resilient crops and livestock, and community institutions capable of acting before crisis. Cross-border landscapes can also supply evidence on shared aquifers, pastoral mobility and regional risk. Generating strong evidence that the cost of inaction is far higher than the cost of a coordinated action. 

COP17’s soil, finance and Science-Policy Interface decisions raise the standard for evidence. MFL will continue to place baselines, synergy enhancement, trade-off analysis and impact measurement at the start of restoration design, combine remote sensing with field and community-generated data, and quantify public as well as private returns. Working with Scaling for Impact, this evidence can be translated into country-owned programmes and investment cases, not left as research outputs. 

Land tenure and inclusion will also be treated as scientific and implementation questions, not peripheral safeguards. CGIAR can track who controls land and water, whose knowledge informs decisions, who bears transition costs and who receives benefits. This is essential to make restoration durable and to keep gender, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists and local communities visible in implementation even where negotiated language remains contested. 

Coordination is now implementation 

The collaborative space argument advanced by Lulseged Tamene Desta and Cargele Masso is for a practical platform, not another administrative layer. A Multifunctional Landscapes Collaborative space can bring together and connect existing networks, align metrics, connect learning sites, co-develop a small number of investable landscape programmes, and carry evidence into UNCCD intersessional work and other Rio processes. CGIAR has already outlined how food, land and water systems can connect the Rio Conventions. The collaborative-space’s legitimacy will come from what partners deliver together before, during, and after COP18, particularly anticipating and contributing to designing the post-SDG agenda. 

Where do we go from Ulaanbaatar 

CGIAR’s contribution after COP17 is therefore practical: turn Living Landscapes into places where negotiated ambitions are tested against real decisions about water, production, conservation, rights and finance; then make the resulting evidence usable by communities, governments and investors. COP17 clarified both the openings and the gaps. The measure of success now is whether science helps convert them into healthier land, more resilient food systems and stronger livelihoods, landscape by landscape. 

Also Read: Bayer Advances Plan to Launch 10 Blockbuster Products Over the Next 10 Years

Global Agriculture is an independent international media platform covering agri-business, policy, technology, and sustainability. For editorial collaborations, thought leadership, and strategic communications, write to pr@global-agriculture.com