ULAANBAATAR — More than 340 civil society organisations, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women and youth organisations and networks, as well as governments and UN agencies, from around the world sent an urgent joint letter to the Presidencies of the three Rio Conventions (UNCCD, CBD and UNFCCC) and their Executive Secretaries following the unprecedented unilateral blockage of adoption of key agenda items concerning gender equality, civil society engagement, Rio Convention synergies and the UNCCD Future Strategic Framework, including matters related Indigenous Peoples and civil society engagement.

The letter calls on the Mongolian Presidency of UNCCD COP17 to support all Parties to take the urgent action needed to ensure these agenda items are reinstated and that previously agreed commitments and the text of the Convention are upheld. It also calls on Australia and Türkiye in relation to UNFCCC COP31, and Armenia as the CBD COP17 Presidency, to ensure cooperation across the three Rio Conventions and safeguard multilateralism; as well as to protect agreed provisions related to gender equality, the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the full and effective participation of civil society. 

The signatories warn that allowing individual Parties to disrupt established multilateral commitments and processes risks setting a dangerous precedent extending far beyond UNCCD COP17. At a time of interconnected crises of land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change, effective multilateral action depends on protecting agreed commitments and ensuring that Indigenous Peoples, women, youth and civil society have a meaningful role in shaping and implementing decisions that directly affect their rights, lands, territories, resources and futures.

The joint letter and full list of signatories are available to the media. Civil society and Indigenous Peoples’ representatives attending UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar are available for interviews and comments.

Media contacts:

Mwanahamisi Singano – WEDO – mwanahamisi@wedo.org

Beth Roberts – Stand for Her Land – bethr@landesa.org

Ms. Cristina Eghenter opened by answering the question she’d been asked directly: what’s driving these gaps? Her answer was a lack of attention, capacity, and — bluntly — political will, echoed in the Global Report on Collective Progress and its findings on how inconsistently a whole-of-society approach has been applied so far. Her ask to Parties followed from that diagnosis: address the inconsistency head-on, advance women’s leadership under the Framework, and give real weight to women-led solutions that are already accelerating implementation on the ground.

Ms. Najma Mahamud opened by explaining why direct access to funding matters so much in the first place: without it, biodiversity finance gets filtered through layers of institutions that women’s organizations, Indigenous women and grassroots groups rarely have a real foothold in. She painted a picture of the structural barriers that make indirect access so often meaningless in practice — convoluted applications, patchy information on what funding even exists, no legal recognition over land, and eligibility rules written for large institutions rather than community groups. Turning to how direct access can actually be made operative, her fix was concrete — dedicated, directly accessible funding windows, paired with the capacity support to use them and the accountability to track where the money actually goes. As she put it, direct access doesn’t mean much if organizations are still left to navigate a complicated application alone.

Ms. Najma Mahamud picked up the thread on resource mobilization, walking through the meaning of direct access to the resources and the barriers that keep biodiversity finance from reaching the women’s organizations doing the work: convoluted applications, patchy information on what funding even exists, no legal recognition over land, and eligibility rules written for large institutions rather than community groups. Her proposed fix was equally concrete — dedicated, directly accessible funding windows, paired with the capacity support to use them and the accountability to track where the money actually goes. As she put it, direct access to funding doesn’t mean much if organizations are still left to navigate a complicated application alone.