Restoring land, restoring hope: Rethinking investment in rangelands after COP17
The 17th session of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17), held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, from 17-28 August 2026, placed land restoration, drought resilience, and investment high on the global agenda. Governments, scientists, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, pastoralists, civil society, development institutions, businesses, and other stakeholders came together under the theme “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope.”
Among those participating were Ken Otieno, Pascal Ogola, and Laureen Ongesa from the Resource Conflict Institute (RECONCILE), the Africa Regional Focal Point for the Land Matrix Initiative (LMI). For RECONCILE and the LMI, COP17 was an opportunity to raise a question that is becoming increasingly important as investment flows into rangelands: how can we ensure that those investments restore land without undermining the people and livelihoods that depend on it?
Discussions with Dr Osama Ibrahim Faqeeha, advisor to the UNCCD COP16 Presidency and Deputy Minister for Environment at the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Environment ,Water and Agriculture
Over the two weeks of COP17, discussions ranged from land restoration and drought resilience to water, food systems, finance, and land governance. The programme brought these issues together across four broad areas of action: finance, water, land and people, and food systems and soil health. Negotiations also addressed drought, land tenure, rangelands and pastoralists, gender, migration, private-sector participation, and the future strategic direction of the Convention.
Rangelands and pastoralists featured particularly prominently, against the backdrop of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP 2026). This attention reflected a growing recognition that rangelands are not simply degraded ecosystems waiting to be restored. They are lived and managed landscapes that support food security, livelihoods, biodiversity, and resilience.
COP17's political attention to rangelands was reflected in the ministerial dialogue[1] on the restoration of rangelands and the well-being of pastoralist communities, as well as in the formal COP17 decision on rangelands and pastoralists (ICCD/COP(17)/L.19).[2] The decision encourages Parties to develop and implement policies and legal frameworks for the sustainable management, conservation, and restoration of rangelands. It also calls for improved tenure security in rangelands in line with the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT).
RECONCILE Executive Director Ken Otieno making his contribution during the launch of the Rangelands Flagship Initiative
There was also greater space for the voices of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women, and youth. Declarations and reports from these constituencies, together with discussions on women herders and pastoralists, reinforced an important principle: rangeland restoration must be understood not only as an ecological objective, but also as a question of rights, livelihoods, participation, and governance.
At the same time, COP17 demonstrated that restoration will require investment at scale. The launch of the Rangelands Flagship Initiative brought together around US$1.2 billion across 45 projects, while a further US$1.3 billion portfolio of land-restoration finance was announced across 23 countries. The Drought Resilience Investment Facility was also launched with an ambition to mobilise up to US$400 million in public and private capital for drought resilience.
These commitments signal that money and political attention are beginning to move towards rangelands. But investment in land is never neutral. Carbon projects, renewable energy developments, conservation initiatives, and mining can all create new demands for land and resources. An investment may contribute to an important environmental or climate objective while simultaneously producing displacement, restricting access to resources, weakening customary tenure or generating conflict.
This is the green investment paradox: an investment can be environmentally beneficial in its stated objective while creating social and livelihood costs on the ground. It is here that the Land Matrix perspective becomes particularly relevant. The Land Matrix has traditionally helped make large-scale land acquisitions visible – where they occur, how much land is involved, and what types of investments are taking place. But as the investment landscape changes, there is a growing need to understand what happens on the ground, who is affected, whose rights are recognised, and how investment changes access to land and resources.
The COP17 side event, “Rethinking Investment in Rangelands: Advancing Inclusive Green Investments and Pastoralist Rights through the IYRP 2026 Campaign,” provided an opportunity to bring these questions directly into the discussion. Land Matrix data helped illustrate changing patterns of land investment and their potential overlaps with Indigenous Peoples and local communities, as well as areas governed through customary or collective rights.
More importantly, the discussion shifted the focus from simply asking where investments are located to asking what those investments mean for people, rights, and landscapes, with four key questions emerging.
1. Does secure tenure mean secure access?
Formal recognition of land rights does not always capture the full relationship between people and land. In rangelands, rights can be collective, seasonal, overlapping, and customary. A title deed or certificate may provide legal recognition while still failing to protect access to grazing areas, water points, livestock corridors and other shared resources.
For this reason, tenure security must be understood not only as legal recognition, but also as the practical ability of people to continue accessing and using the resources on which their livelihoods depend.
2. Can we see displacement before it becomes displacement?
For pastoralists, displacement does not necessarily begin with physical relocation. It can begin when a fence blocks a livestock corridor, a road fragments grazing areas, a mine affects access to water, or a conservation boundary restricts seasonal movement.
Individually, these interventions may appear limited. Collectively, however, they can undermine an entire livelihood system. Recognising these gradual and indirect forms of displacement is therefore essential if investment is to avoid causing harm before that harm becomes irreversible.
3. What does meaningful participation look like?
Consultation alone does not tell us whether communities had meaningful influence over decisions affecting their land. The more important questions are: Who participated? When did they participate? What information did they receive? Could they influence the outcome? And what options existed when they disagreed?
For investments in rangelands to be genuinely inclusive, participation needs to extend beyond informing communities about decisions that have already been made. It must provide meaningful opportunities to shape those decisions.
4. What happens when investment generates conflict?
Land investment is rarely only about land. It is also about power, identity, livelihoods, natural resources, and competing visions of development. In rangelands, where different users depend on the same landscape at different times and for different purposes, changes in access can quickly generate tensions.
Addressing these conflicts requires attention not only to formal dispute-resolution systems, but also to customary institutions, Alternative Dispute Resolution, and other locally trusted mechanisms. Understanding how these systems interact with formal governance can help ensure that emerging conflicts are addressed before they escalate.
Taken together, these questions point to a broader understanding of responsible investment in rangelands and the need to understand how investments affect tenure, access, mobility, participation, and conflict.
In this sense, COP17 provided an important policy foundation. The discussions, the side event, and the eventual decision on rangelands and pastoralists reflected growing recognition of the need for secure tenure and access, protection of pastoral mobility and livelihoods, meaningful participation in decisions affecting rangelands, and more inclusive and accountable approaches to investment and land governance.
As the scale of investment in restoration and rangelands grows, investors, governments, and development institutions will need to ensure that environmental ambitions are matched by strong social and governance safeguards. Land Matrix data and other forms of evidence can help make investment patterns visible, but visibility must ultimately lead to accountability.
COP17 showed that the money and political attention are beginning to move. The task now is to ensure that they move in ways that restore rather than dispossess, strengthen rather than fragment, and benefit both people and planet.