The initiative carries a second figure: about a million hectares under sustainable management by that same year. Its listed partners are the convention secretariat, the Qatar Fund for Development, the Middle East Green Initiative, IUCN, the European Union, the OPEC Fund and Germany's GIZ. ADB vice-president Scott Morris called land degradation a threat no single country can handle alone.
The host banked its own money the day before. Mongolia signed for up to €200 million with the European Investment Bank, of which up to €20 million is a European Union grant and up to €100 million is concessional lending, and for up to $100 million in blended finance from the World Bank. Environment minister Sandag-Ochir Tsend signed for Mongolia, EIB vice-president Gelsomina Vigliotti and World Bank vice-president Guangzhe Chen for the lenders. Both sit under what Ulaanbaatar calls its Steppe Action Agenda.
A larger package came the same day: a rangelands initiative the convention describes as $1.2 billion across 45 projects, inside a $1.3 billion pipeline reaching 23 countries.
A window can be drawn on; an instrument can be invoked.
Now the other column. The contact group handling drought is working three drafts at once: bracketed text carried over from COP16 that would create an international instrument, a version built on national effort, and a programme approach. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin recorded delegates stuck on 24 August, one of them saying, “We are far better than that.”
Central Asia's delegations spent their interventions on the money column. Kyrgyzstan asked for green bonds, debt-for-nature swaps, guarantees, insurance and payments for ecosystem services, and for a dedicated financial window for mountain land and river basin resilience. Tajikistan backed bonds and swaps. Both spoke on 24 August, inside a negotiating group the conference lists as Central Asia and Russia.
That is a rational bid and a narrow one. A window can be drawn on; an instrument can be invoked. The region carries the drought exposure. It bids for the first.
The trouble with the bid sits upstream of it. GEF-9 opened with $3.9 billion in initial pledges, 27% below GEF-8, a figure the European Union itself put on the record on 18 August. The windows Bishkek and Dushanbe are asking for are being cut at the source that fills them.
Three days are left. Azerbaijan's Ulfat Machanov sits as one of its vice-presidents, and Mongolia's foreign minister Battsetseg Batmunkh presides over the close on 28 August. If the drought text lands as a programme rather than an instrument, the region's exposure stays what it is tonight, a funding question with a queue in front of it.