Pastoralists Demand Seat at UN Desertification Talks
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- Andrew Msami, a Maasai pastoralist from northeast Tanzania, told Grist his community has been forced to sell cattle — central to their identity and wealth — and buy drought-hardier goats as desertification "attacks our identity."
- Msami and hundreds of other pastoralists are at the 17th UNCCD conference in Mongolia this week, calling for stronger protections for Indigenous pastoral traditions, greater funding access, and recognition that generational knowledge offers lessons for adapting to a hotter, drier world.
- This year's UNCCD meeting is the first to feature a formal caucus specifically for Indigenous peoples — a structure absent from the climate and biodiversity COPs — though the caucus faced resistance in week one, prompting Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim to lead a protest demanding full participation.
- Ibrahim, the Mbororo from Chad who chairs the Indigenous peoples caucus, said trillions have flowed to climate and biodiversity conferences since the 1992 Earth Summit while desertification was "relegated to a problem for the developing world" — a framing she says is cracking as Spain, France, and Sweden face their worst droughts in two years, and as the desert in Chad advances 2 kilometers per year.
- Solange Bandiaky-Badji of the Rights and Resources Initiative said securing land and mobility rights is "not separate from climate adaptation" but fundamental to resilience — arguing pastoralists are routinely excluded from negotiations over their lands because mobility complicates land rights recognition.
- The gathering coincides with the UN's International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, and roughly a third of Mongolia's population practices pastoralism yet often has no seat in global climate discussions.
Why it matters: For the roughly 500 million pastoralists worldwide, the UNCCD's first-ever Indigenous peoples caucus could convert decades of exclusion at climate and biodiversity COPs into binding land and mobility protections — which advocates call a precondition for adaptation on the half of the planet classified as rangelands. With Spain, France, and Sweden now in severe drought, the "developing world" framing of desertification is cracking.
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