The United Nations has started talks aimed at halting the degradation and desertification of vast swathes of land started in Saudi Arabia last 2 Deember after scientists fired a stark warning over unsustainable farming and deforestation.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called it a "moonshot moment": a 12-day meeting for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), looking to protect and restore land and respond to drought amid the onslaught of climate change.
The last such meeting, or "Conference of the Parties" (COP) to the convention, held in Ivory Coast in 2022, produced a commitment to "accelerating the restoration of one billion hectares of degraded land by 2030".
But the UNCCD, which brings together 196 countries and the European Union, now says 1.5 billion hectares (3.7 billion acres) must be restored by decade's end to combat crises including escalating droughts.
A day before the COP16 talks in Saudi Arabia, home to one of the world's biggest deserts, a new UN report warned that forest loss and degraded soils were reducing resilience to climate change and biodiversity loss.
"If we fail to acknowledge the pivotal role of land and take appropriate action, the consequences will ripple through every aspect of life and extend well into the future," UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw said in the report.
Land degradation disrupts ecosystems and makes land less productive for agriculture, leading to food shortages and spurring migration.
Land is considered degraded when its productivity has been harmed by human activities like pollution or deforestation. Desertification is an extreme form of degradation.
Thousands of delegates have registered to attend the December 2-13 COP16 talks in Riyadh, including "close to 100" government ministers, Thiaw said.
The event comes at a parlous time for the COP environmental meetings, which bring together the signatories to various treaties to try to strike new agreements.
Last week the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan came to a contentious end, as a pledge of US$ 300 billion to help poorer countries transition to cleaner energy was slammed as too low by developing nations.
Last 1 December in Busan, South Korea, deeply divided negotiators missed a deadline to reach a landmark global treaty to curb plastic pollution.
And last month, talks in Colombia -- also called COP16 -- ended without a roadmap to ramp up funding for species protection. They will resume in Rome in February.