Drought resilience is not only about knowing when and where drought will occur. It is about understanding how well societies, economies, ecosystems and institutions can anticipate, prepare for and adapt to its impacts —and where action can make them better able to withstand the next shock.“We have become very good at observing drought. But we are still, in many ways, data-rich and decision-poor,” said UNCCD Chief Scientist Barron Orr at the launch. The challenge, he stressed, is to turn increasingly sophisticated drought information into actionable intelligence.”During the UNCCD COP17, the launch of Phase II (version Beta) of the International Drought Resilience Observatory (IDRO) brought together governments, scientists and international partners to address the challenge of how to turn growing knowledge about drought into stronger resilience.The launch introduced the Drought Resilience Index (DRI) to help countries assess their capacity to anticipate, prepare for and adapt to drought. By bringing together evidence across environmental, social, infrastructure and economic dimensions, the Index aims to show where resilience is weakest and where action and investment could make the greatest difference. The new tool has been developed under the International Drought Resilience Alliance (IDRA), with UNCCD and in collaboration with the Yale Center for Environment and Architecture and partner institutions from around the world. Now in beta, IDRO has been financed by Spain, which co-chairs IDRA with Senegal, and the European Union.From measuring drought to measuring resilience“As we are seeing from Europe to the Horn of Africa to the Panama Canal, drought does not stay where its starts,” said UNCCD Deputy Executive Secretary Andrea Meza, who noted that “its impacts cut across economies and ecosystems and persist over time. A drought affecting crops or water supplies in one place can disrupt energy, transport, supply chains and livelihoods far beyond where it began making it essential to manage drought risk in a cross-cutting manner and at all levels of governance”, she said.Meza added: “The same drought does not necessarily have the same impacts everywhere. Its consequences depend on the capacity of communities, economies and ecosystems to absorb the impact, adapt and recover. Resilience is about reducing that vulnerability, and IDRO can help us understand where it lies.”Meza placed IDRO within a broader global architecture for drought resilience, alongside IDRA, the Drought Resilience Investment Facility (DRIF) and the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership (RGDRP).Making resilience gaps visibleEdgar Gutiérrez, IDRO Senior Policy Advisor and former Minister of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica, described the Drought Resilience Index as “a practical decision compass —showing not only where drought risk exists, but where resilience is weakest, what dimension needs attention, and where action and investment can have the greatest preventive impact.”IDRO aids Users to explore how countries perform across three dimensions —Anticipate, Prepare and Adapt— and across four domains: the Natural Environment, Built Environment, People and Community, and Economy. Interactive maps, country profiles, underlying indicators and data sources, case studies and an AI-enabled function that helps interpret search results allow users to explore the evidence behind the Index.“A report is a snapshot, frozen at the time of publication”, said Anna Dyson, Founding Director of the Yale Center for Environment and Architecture (CEA). “IDRO turns the Drought Resilience Index into a practical tool, allowing users to go beyond a single score to understand what is driving resilience, identify priorities and support better-informed decisions.”María Jesús Rodríguez de Sancho, Director General for Forest Policy and Desertification Control at Spain’s Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), noted: “It is our hope that IDRO may contribute to bridge the gap between knowledge and action, by bringing together scientific evidence, local experience and policy-relevant information in a single platform.” Spain, which co-chairs IDRA with Senegal, has contributed one of IDRO’s in-depth case studies, alongside Australia, Brazil, Mongolia, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and the United States. Together, the case studies bring country experience into the platform, translating data and evidence into practical lessons that can be adapted to other contexts.Scientific and international partnersSenegal’s role as IDRA co-chair was also reflected in the launch, with Aliou Gory Diouf, Minister of Environment and Ecological Transition, highlighting the importance of international cooperation in strengthening drought resilience.The launch also brought together scientific and technical partners behind IDRO. Andrea Toreti, Senior Scientist and Head of the Copernicus EMS Drought Observatory at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre,highlighted the need for drought intelligence to evolve alongside advances in science and technology. Valentin Aich, senior Water and Climate specialist with the Global Water Partnership and World Meteorological Organization, emphasized the importance of translating resilience assessments into practical support for decision-makers, while Hind Wildman, Co-founder of Yale CEA, highlighted the value of making complex information accessible to different audiences.Ina Marčiulionytė, Ambassador and Head of Delegation of the European Union to Mongolia, also underscored the importance of strengthening resilience through cooperation and better evidence. With Phase II, IDRO aims to support earlier, more targeted action, helping countries reduce the vulnerability for communities, economies and ecosystems.

Land is often discussed at global conferences in hectares, targets and indicators. For the people who live from the land, it is also home, livelihood, culture, memory and identity. At UNCCD COP17, held in Ulaanbaatar in August, that reality was evident in discussions on land tenure, rangelands, science and knowledge, finance and implementation. Across them, one practical issue kept surfacing: how to bring the knowledge of people who manage the land into decisions on its use, assessment and restoration. Throughout COP17, the role of Indigenous Peoples as well as local communities in restoring and sustainably managing land featured prominently in formal discussions. Parties and observers emphasized the value of bringing Indigenous knowledge together with science and of strengthening land rights and tenure security. Representative of civil society organizations and Indigenous Peoples also called for community-generated data to inform reporting and for communities to be engaged as partners in implementation and decision-making. Some of those priorities were reflected in the final decisions. On land tenure, Parties encouraged inclusive and participatory dialogue from local to national level, drawing on all forms of available knowledge, and recognized customary and communal rights of access to natural resources. The decision on rangelands recognized pastoralists as critical stewards, acknowledged mobility as an adaptation and resilience strategy and called for knowledge accumulated by pastoralists to inform efforts to close knowledge and data gaps. The specific agenda item on civil society participation, however, was not considered at COP17 and will return at COP18. Outside the negotiating rooms, practitioners and Indigenous participants brought these questions down to the level of everyday experience. Maedeh Salimi of Iran, a programme director at the Center for Sustainable Development and Environment (CENESTA), works with pastoralists, smallholder farmers and fishing communities. She described land as far more than a source of income. A community’s culture, food system, social structure and future are tied to its territory, she said. Indigenous Peoples as well as local communities therefore need a direct role in decisions affecting those territories as rights-holders. Several voices at COP17 stressed that useful evidence does not come from formal science alone. Ecologist Ermias Betemariam of the Nairobi-based Landscape Alliance says young scientists need to learn not only from books but also from communities, farmers and pastoralists — to “read landscapes and people” alongside scientific literature. Tai Pelli, a Borican Taíno from Puerto Rico with the United Confederation of Taíno Peoples, put the same point more directly. “We cannot make Indigenous knowledge secondary or inferior to what modern science has,” she said. “I think that if we work together, we can make a huge difference.” One example of that collaboration came from South Africa. At a DryNet event on community-driven rangeland management, participants presented restoration work where grazing plans are co-designed with communities rather than delivered to them. Farmers implement the plans with locally recruited eco-rangers, including young people and women, while restoration is linked to training, market access and livelihoods. The experience demonstrated that technical interventions are only part of the equation: restoration is more likely to last when communities have ownership, functioning local institutions and economic opportunities tied to the land. UNCCD Executive Secretary Yasmine Fouad speaks at the opening of the COP17 Indigenous Peoples' PavilionAt an event on Indigenous data and resilient territories, participants explored what people on the ground can add to information gathered from above. Satellite data can show that something has changed; communities can often explain what that change means and why it happened. Indigenous representatives and practitioners working in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and West Africa described monitoring systems that combine satellite imagery, GPS, drones and mapping with knowledge built up over generations. In the Peruvian Amazon, Indigenous monitors collect territorial data to identify threats and guide conservation and restoration. Pastoralist groups carried many of these priorities into a collective declaration. The Ulaanbaatar Declaration, adopted by pastoralist and Indigenous peoples at the Global Pastoralist Gathering ahead of COP17 and presented during the COP’s open dialogue, describes pastoralists as rights-holders, knowledge holders and solution providers. It calls for recognition of mobility and customary governance, free, prior and informed consent, meaningful participation, direct access to finance and the need to recognize pastoralist knowledge systems alongside scientific knowledge. For Erjen Khamaganova, a Buryat-Mongol representative of the World Union of Indigenous Spiritual Practitioners at COP17 and a founding member of its Elders Council, knowledge of the land is also inseparable from responsibility. Frameworks and finance cannot deliver implementation without real engagement at community level, she said. Her own vision of land is rooted in ancestral ideas of two-way responsibility between people and Mother Earth — a relationship in which caring for land is an obligation upheld across generations. The question of knowledge and stewardship ultimately leads to another: who has a voice in the work of the Convention. During COP17, the UNCCD Indigenous Peoples Caucus, the  Local Communities Caucus, Civil Society Organizations Panel, Youth Caucus and Gender Caucus came together to call for meaningful participation in UNCCD decision-making and for their role to be fully reflected in the Convention’s work. “We are here to offer solutions that are born from our close relationship with nature and with the land,” said Jennifer Tauli Corpuz of the Indigenous Peoples' Caucus. While COP17 did not resolve every question around participation, it marked the first formal meetings of the Indigenous Peoples Caucus and Local Communities Caucus and brought together the largest representation of Indigenous Peoples in the history of a UNCCD COP. Parties took note with appreciation of the declarations of Indigenous Peoples, the youth  the local communities and the Mayors and included them in the COP17 proceedings. They did the same with the declaration by civil society organizations and summaries of the two civil society open dialogues. The land tenure decision also asks the secretariat to support the convening of all four UNCCD caucuses as a way to enrich discussions on land tenure and implementation. The participation debate remains unfinished, but the programme for COP18 puts civil society participation back on the agenda and provides for the caucuses to convene again when Parties meet in Egypt in 2028. Photo : © UNCCD/Kiara Worth

About 30 mayors, governors and other local and regional leaders gathered this week at the UNCCD COP17 Mayors' Forum adopted the Ulaanbaatar Declaration, committing to advance local action on sustainable land management and drought resilience, and calling for a stronger, more permanent role for cities and regions in the UNCCD process.