2024 UN Desertification Conference (COP16)

What is the Science, Technology and Innovation Day?

Science, Technology, and Innovation Day at UNCCD COP16 focuses on advancing scientific and technological solutions to support land health and resilient communities. With land degradation escalating, it aims to bridge science and policy by engaging diverse stakeholders — research institutions, data providers, tech developers and civil society — to drive ambitious, science-based action for sustainable land management.

This thematic day will feature high-level dialogues and interactive sessions, including the launch of the International Science, Technology and Innovation Forum. Through these events, the Day seeks to promote innovations that address land degradation and enhance drought resilience.

Event focus

1. Scaling up science for land and drought: Highlights critical gaps in land and drought science and explores investment needs for advancing sustainable land management, featuring the dialogue Healing Our Land through Science and Earth Intelligence
2. Empowering young scientists: Engages emerging researchers in discussions on land restoration, climate resilience and policy innovation through the Re-Generation Young Scientists Dialogue
3. Showcasing Earth intelligence solutions: The Science and Innovation Hub will feature user-driven Earth intelligence tools for addressing land degradation, with a focus on innovative finance to advance these applications

Objectives

• Raise ambition for science and innovation: Promote the role of science, technology, and innovation in enhancing land and drought resilience
• Support emerging scientists: Encourage a new generation of researchers in land resilience, fostering intergenerational collaboration
• Integrate Earth intelligence: Emphasize Earth intelligence as a tool for sustainable land management and drought resilience

The Green Zone will also host a Science-Policy Interface Day, dedicated to fostering dialogue among scientists, policymakers and practitioners on addressing desertification, land degradation and drought with particular focus on historical and future aridity trends and sustainable land use systems.

By fostering collaboration and innovation, Science Day at UNCCD COP16 aims to accelerate progress in land restoration and resilience building worldwide.

High Level Interactive Dialogue

High-level Interactive Dialogue: Healing our land through science and Earth Intelligence

Land is fundamental for addressing multiple global challenges, including combating degradation and drought, halting biodiversity loss, as well as mitigating and adapting to climate change. Despite special reports by the IPCC and IPBES on the connection between land, climate and biodiversity, there is still a lack of recognition that halting land degradation is crucial to maintain a space for solutions to these interlinked challenges. Large-scale initiatives still address these challenges in silos, thereby exacerbating other challenges. This high-level interactive dialogue “healing our land through science and Earth Intelligence” aims to elaborate a way forward to scale up science and data on healing our land, linking land stewardship and restoration with climate and biodiversity goals, and aspirations for improved human well-being.

It does so by involving stakeholders from diverse fields, including science and academia, data providers and users of Earth Observation, governments, civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations, as well as the United Nations. It consists of a session on science gaps, a session on data gaps and a concluding session on launching an Action Agenda to scale up science and Earth Intelligence to address the global environmental crises. The overall session will be chaired by H.E. Munir Al-Desouki (President of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology - KACST), the session on science gaps will be moderated by Xiaomeng Shen (Director of United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security – UNU-EHS and Vice-Rector in Europe), and the session on data gaps will be moderated by Yana Gevorgyan (Director of Secretariat, Group on Earth Observations – GEO).

Objectives of the high-level interactive dialogue

• Highlighting the need for new and additional science on land, considering the crucial role that land has for human well-being, and identify ways forward to scale up science for sustainable land management by addressing goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as biodiversity conservation simultaneously.
• Identifying data gaps, as well as new and emerging datasets for SDG 15.3.1 reporting, Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) planning and implementation, and their potential to support goals of all three Rio Conventions including for challenging environments such as small island developing states (SIDS) and hyper-arid areas.
• Identifying enablers and barriers, based on good practice examples to improve policy, institutional and funding mechanisms, to scale up science and Earth Intelligence to reverse the current upward trend in land degradation.
• Launch an Action Agenda to initiate progress.