In the heat of northern Kenya, a herder is watching the sky, just as he has every day for weeks.

The rains that should have come by now haven't, and the grass his herd needs is getting scarcer. His situation is not unique. From Africa’s shrinking grasslands to Central Asia’s salt-stained plains, this story is playing out across borders and communities. 

Around the globe, two billion people depend on rangelands for food, pasture/grazing for livestock, and livelihoods. These ecosystems support nearly 70 percent of all livestock feed worldwide, yet up to 40 percent are already degraded or at risk of disappearing, affected by drought, overgrazing, conversion to other land uses and decades of under-prioritization. 

RESTORING LAND, RESTORING HOPE

This year, global efforts to reverse this trend will take shape in Ulaanbaatar. From 17 to 28 August 2026, Mongolia is hosting the seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), coinciding with the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists under the theme ‘Restoring Land, Restoring Hope’. The urgency of the theme is clear: land degradation costs the global economy almost US$900 billion every year, and increasingly severe and frequent droughts add another US$300 billion annually. But viable pathways to reverse these trends exist, and investing in restoration and drought resilience is among the most effective measures countries can take. 

The UNDP Nature Pledge supports hundreds of projects and initiatives around the world that advance these efforts, from policy reform to community-led restoration. The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Network (BES-Net) is one of its flagship initiatives, focusing on strengthening the biodiversity science-policy-practice interface and linking evidence with practical action. The following three stories illustrate BES-Net’s dedicated support for rangeland ecosystems across Botswana, Kazakhstan, and Kenya. 

Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea had largely disappeared by the end of the 20th century, leaving behind a salt desert spanning more than 5.4 million hectares. In Kazakhstan's Kyzylorda region, which borders the North Aral Sea, more than 80 percent of pastures are degraded. Dust storms carry toxic salts across thousands of kilometres, placing immense pressure on both the land and the people who depend on it. 

Between 2022 and 2024, BES-Net supported a detailed analytical study of the climate, land and water nexus in the Kyzylorda region. It marked one of the first attempts to systematically map these interconnected challenges and translate them into concrete recommendations for land and water management. The findings are now feeding into Kazakhstan's pasture restoration and irrigation planning, as well as the expansion of a large-scale saxaul replanting programme on the dried seabed, already covering 337,000 hectares and aiming at reaching 1.1 million hectares by 2030.

Marsabit County hosts the only true desert in Kenya: the Chalbi Desert, which is now expanding. Satellite data going back to 1990 show that grasslands in Kargi, Maikona, and North Horr have gradually been replaced by barren land. If the trend continues, the desert is projected to double in size within a few decades, encroaching on the pastures that sustain the livelihoods of communities who have long called these drylands home. 

Between 2024 and 2025, BES-Net worked with Kenya's National Environmental Management Authority to map 33 years of desertification trends across the Chalbi, combining satellite imagery with community narratives and the Indigenous and local knowledge of elders who recall how the landscape looked before the grasslands started degrading. This evidence then guided pilot action on the ground: a gabion in Kalacha to redirect flash floods, demonstration plots testing natural and assisted regeneration, and community training to monitor and document emerging trends.