Harnessing Land–Climate–Biodiversity Synergies at the 2026 Triple COP

Spotlight 

• Modern environmental crises are deeply interconnected and addressing them in siloes will lead to costly and counterproductive trade-offs.
• The sequential 2026 Rio Conventions on desertification, biodiversity, and climate offer a rare opportunity to align global policy, monitoring, finance, and implementation.
• Scaling local solutions requires pooling public and private finance for cross-cutting projects, plus enhancing stewardship and participation of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs). 

The Conference of the Parties (COP) 28 global stocktake provided a harrowing reality check— we are quickly approaching the 1.5 degree Celsius climate threshold. Modern-day environmental crises are not emerging in siloes; they are interdependent in nature, driven by identical factors of unsustainable land use, overexploitation of natural resources, economic pressures, and governance failures. For instance, the agricultural sector contributes nearly one-third of global emissions while also being responsible for a loss of 75 percent of plant genetic diversity and 90 percent of global deforestation.

In 2026, a rare convergence of three Rio Conventions are unraveling in quick succession to confront intersecting land, biodiversity, and climate change challenges. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) wrapped up in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in August, with the theme of “Restoring Land, Restoring Hope.” The United Nations Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP17) will take place in Yerevan, Armenia, in October, with the theme  “Taking Action for Nature.”  The United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP31) will follow shortly after in Antalya, Turkey, in November 2026, aiming “Towards a Sustainable, Resilient and Equitable Future.”

With implementation as the focal point of each agenda, it presents a unique opportunity to drive a systemic shift and catalyse the implementation of acknowledged synergies between climate, biodiversity, and land.

This triple COP also unfolds against unprecedented heat waves across Europe, deadly flash floods in Nepal, and a mounting El Niño, which further expose the interdependencies of environmental crises. With implementation as the focal point of each agenda, it presents a unique opportunity to drive a systemic shift and catalyse the implementation of acknowledged synergies between climate, biodiversity, and land, while also pooling financing for more integrated approaches and advancing Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) stewardship.

Multiplicative Costs of Siloed Governance

Siloed approaches to interconnected crises can risk duplicating efforts or undermining other environmental objectives, wasteful spending, or fragmented responses. For example, incentives or innovation developed to address one crisis can inadvertently worsen another. Additionally, siloed governance that fails to integrate cross-cutting approaches can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities to harness co-benefits. Such maladaptive management may increase emissions, resulting in the loss of nature-based adaptation opportunities.

If incentive schemes or innovations are not aligned between biodiversity, climate, and land objectives, they risk widening trade-offs and harming overall ecosystem resilience. Land-based climate measures that focus on single ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, may unintentionally harm biodiversity and climate. For instance, afforestation schemes, such as subsidies or carbon offset credit schemes, led to monoculture tree planting in ecologically rich areas, resulting in biodiversity loss and increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from decaying matter. Siloed mandates to expand biofuel production and support clean energy access may reduce land for food cultivation and drive habitat loss. Moreover, hydroelectric dams or wind farms reduce GHGs, but may disrupt freshwater biodiversity.

Fragmented sectoral decision-making or disconnected stakeholder coordination can also lead to missed opportunities for synergy or counterproductive outcomes. A lack of collaboration between energy, urban planning, and land-use ministries may advance electric vehicles without harnessing their potential to serve as energy storage units through vehicle-to-grid technologies. Expanding desalination plants to meet water demand without managing brine discharge can harm local marine ecosystems.

Three Possible Pillars of Convergence

Operating in siloes risks prioritising one agenda over the other. Trade-offs are inevitable, but multilateral processes can help identify solutions with co-benefits, while providing a platform to negotiate trade-offs or identify ways to minimise them. Although integrating governance over land, biodiversity, and climate objectives is best implemented at the local level, the 2026 Triple COP offers three areas of convergence to align separate narratives:

• Aligning Agendas, Monitoring, and Implementation of Climate, Biodiversity, and Land Synergies

Each Rio Convention houses its own agenda, planning instruments, and metrics that offer entry points to bridging siloed priorities: the UNFCCC’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs); the CBD’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans; and the UNCCD’s Land Degradation Neutrality Targets. Conversations at the 2025 UNFCCC COP30 raised a collective desire to advocate for UNFCCC agenda items that formally unify separate biodiversity, climate, and land objectives under a single roadmap managed by a dedicated mechanism to facilitate policy coherence and party ownership.

These dialogues can become launchpads to align national plans, standardise terminology, streamline monitoring and reporting through data and information-sharing, and strengthen technical frameworks.

To start, sideline initiatives such as the Technical Dialogue on Rio Synergies will serve as important vehicles to identify implementation gaps and accelerate knowledge exchange of multi-value solutions, for example, nature-based ones. Representatives have already convened in Ulaanbaatar and plan to reconvene in Yerevan and Antalya, culminating in the launch of a Rio Synergies Action Group—an effort to streamline implementation across UNCCD, CBD, and UNFCCC conventions. These dialogues can become launchpads to align national plans, standardise terminology, streamline monitoring and reporting through data and information-sharing, and strengthen technical frameworks.

• Pooling Public and Private Finance

The global land restoration, biodiversity, and climate financing demands shortfall remains significant. An estimated US$571 billion annually is necessary to achieve climate and biodiversity goals; current finance meets less than 40 percent of the estimated needs. Moreover, global land restoration faces a US$278 billion annual gap. Although the preceding triple COP year delivered important agreements regarding structural mechanisms—such as corporate payments for nature through CBD COP16’s Cali Fund, rules for carbon market trading through UNFCCC COP29’s Article 6, and elevation for long-term drought preparedness through UNCCD COP16’s Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Initiative—alignment across individual strategies and financial mechanisms must be strengthened.

By pooling financial resources for integrated climate–land–biodiversity solutions, the Rio Conventions can minimise competition over declining funding. The Global Environment Facility (GEF), an official financial mechanism under UNFCCC and CBD, has already allocated US$570 million for cross-cutting integrated programmes targeting systemic transformations across nature, food, energy, and health. Encouraging development agencies, multilateral development banks, and bilateral funds to set aside funding for joint activities would also incentivise synergised programmes. This year, the Rio Conventions Joint Capacity-Building programme targets financial resource mobilisation for synergetic projects. Leveraging this programme to encourage integrated spatial planning at the national level to iron out negative context-specific feedback loops would also help prevent market distortions and financing from inadvertently undermining co-benefits.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF), an official financial mechanism under UNFCCC and CBD, has already allocated US$570 million for cross-cutting integrated programmes targeting systemic transformations across nature, food, energy, and health.

The Triple COP can synergise efforts to refine criteria to expand deployment of multi-advantage private financial instruments, such as carbon markets. Nature-based solutions hold massive carbon mitigation potential, yet carbon credits for afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) have historically faced measurement, reporting and verification, additionality, and permanence challenges, or placed considerable reporting burdens for smallholder farmers. In response, nature-based carbon market design has matured, complemented by new non-market structures like the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), which proposes simpler measurement frameworks. Additionally, UN Article 6.4 incorporates biodiversity safeguards to mitigate ecosystem degradation risks. However, only 10 percent of Article 6.4 proposals involve carbon removals through ARR. The three COPs should therefore enhance carbon market standards to foster biodiversity co-benefits, prioritise native species over monocultures, and target high-carbon, high-biodiversity ecosystems. Finally, these sequential platforms can facilitate knowledge exchange on high-integrity carbon, biodiversity credit, and TFFF stacking approaches to maximise capital flow into nature.

Ultimately, scaling integrated finance requires macro-level alignment between public and private finance. Public finance must be strategically deployed through blended finance structures, where concessional capital is leveraged in first-loss tranches, guarantees, and currency hedging to de-risk private capital. At the sovereign level, scaling debt-for-nature swaps and reforming environmentally harmful subsidies into positive incentives can unlock more fiscal space. Finally, standardising investment frameworks by aligning the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) with established reporting standards will provide transparency to guide private capital. To facilitate this, the triple COPs can establish parallel funding criteria, align monitoring metrics, and generate and prioritise funding for integrated projects to create positive policy signals and investment pathways.

• IPLC Stewardship and Governance

IPLCs are increasingly gaining recognition across the three Rio conventions as agents of change. They have tenure rights over 25 percent of the world’s land surface and possess deep knowledge on how to weather converging biodiversity, climate, and land challenges. At the previous Triple COP in 2024, CBD’s COP16 made significant traction in establishing new land tenure monitoring indicators and a permanent body for IPLCs. CBD also explored a joint work programme, establishing a benefit-sharing mechanism for communities in its Cali Fund. Likewise, UNCCD’s COP16 held an Indigenous Peoples Forum to spotlight IPLC contributions to sustainable resource management. UNFCCC’s COP29, however, notably excluded land tenure from UNFCCC negotiations, despite rapid carbon market expansion and land-based climate strategies. The most recent UNFCCC COP30 in Belém in November 2025 positioned forests and land concerns at the forefront of its agenda, explicitly mentioning biodiversity loss, land rights, and deforestation in the final COP30 mutirão (collective efforts) text. Nevertheless, gaps persist regarding the direct distribution of financing to IPLCs, national recognition of IPLC territorial rights, and the advancement of women’s land rights.

The 2026 Triple COP can bridge these by institutionalising IPLC direct-access thresholds, working to standardise land tenure and rights safeguards, and advancing gender-responsive land governance. The TFFF mandates a 20 percent direct payment mechanism to IPLCs, representing a channel that can be replicated in other established financing mechanisms. Meanwhile, enhancing monitoring systems and streamlining land rights indicators across the three Rio Conventions can help encourage national governments to adopt gender-sensitive land-rights policies.

Bridging Ambition and Implementation

Implementing synergies between biodiversity, land, and climate will present challenges. Rising geopolitical tensions, negotiation fatigue, and power imbalances will continue to strain multilateral environmental processes. Competing reporting timelines or national interests may hamper cross-cutting progress, as evident when vital integrated sectors such as agriculture and food systems were omitted from final mutirão texts at UNFCCC COP30 despite explicit inclusion of land rights.

Nevertheless, abandoning or allowing multilateral processes to progress in siloes would harm the most vulnerable nations that leverage multilateral forums for collective action. As 2030 inches closer, the 2026 Triple COP represents a rare alignment to bridge governance gaps, align capital markets, and further institutionalise IPLC stewardship. Seizing this trifecta has the potential to deliver integrated implementation across land, biodiversity, and climate policies.

Leigh Mante is Junior Fellow, Climate and Energy, ORF Middle East.