The Earth Negotiations Bulletin, the summit's standing rapporteur service, reported that the contact group had received news of "a delicate agreement on drought" on Thursday: discussions continue at COP18, building on what COP16 in Riyadh and this conference assembled, with no protocol and no new mechanism adopted here. Alongside it, the bulletin logged progress on rangelands, land tenure and sand-and-dust storms, and unresolved disagreement on the cross-cutting files.
The endgame ran along the line drawn midweek. Washington had refused any instrument at all, binding or voluntary, arguing the tools to tackle drought already exist; Chile bridged with a voluntary pilot implementation mechanism built on case studies, which drew tentative American openness and left the African Group unconvinced. By Tuesday the bulletin had the drought decision "hanging by a thread, with the Presidency trying to find a way forward through intense bilateral negotiations."
The Europeans put their impatience on the record on Thursday morning: a joint statement delivered with member states called some parties "less constructive," as the state agency Montsame carried it.
What remains is mechanics. The decision, such as it is, surfaces inside the Committee of the Whole's report, which the closing plenary adopts with the rest of the package; the official journal put the closing press conference at 17:00 Ulaanbaatar time, midday in Moscow, and the convention's decisions registry still listed only Riyadh's 37 as of Friday morning. Egypt takes the file next as COP18 host in 2028.
“hanging by a thread, with the Presidency trying to find a way forward through intense bilateral negotiations”
For the region that spent the fortnight pitching, the proof moves to paper. Kazakhstan's Green Shield of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan's mountain financial window and data-verification centre, Tajikistan's debt-for-nature line: all were addressed to a conference that now ships its hardest rule to Egypt, and whether any of them landed in the adopted decisions becomes checkable when the final texts publish.