To save the soil, turn land restoration into a global industry

Voluntary pledges have failed to stop desertification. Market mandates and clear prices are the only way forward, argues an author.

by Amarjargal Rinchinnyam, Former PM of Mongolia

August 7, 2026                                                                                                                                             ULAANBAATAR

Not many people will notice it however, an August 2026, more than 1000 delegates will gather in Ulaanbaatar for COP17, the United Nations conference on desertification. The host country, Mongolia, will do its best to demonstrate its hospitality. Mongolia has chosen the theme “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope.” It is a noble sentiment. It is also terribly familiar. Nearly 77% of Mongolia’s territory is degraded, and up to 40% of the Earth’s land surface suffers a similar fate. Yet, as with previous summits, the gathering risks sticking to a comfortable script: high-level speeches, ambitious targets, and photos of ministers committing to “fight land degradation.”

The uncomfortable truth is that three decades of voluntary pledge-making have achieved almost nothing. The land keeps degrading. We do not lack diagnoses; we lack a mechanism.

Consider how other global environmental crises were tackled. Ozone depletion was not halted by moral appeals, but by the Montreal Protocol—a binding instrument with trade sanctions for non-compliance. Acid rain was curtailed not by international summits, but by cap-and-trade systems that placed sulfur dioxide directly onto corporate balance sheets.

Land restoration finance, by contrast, relies almost entirely on goodwill. It mobilises a trickle of the roughly $355bn needed annually. This is not an accidental shortfall; it is precisely what the voluntary pledge model reliably produces.

We need a way to address it.

Think about telecoms. Governments didn’t expand networks by giving speeches about connectivity. It happened when the economics made it financially viable. Look at mining. Companies didn’t venture into remote, challenging areas out of kindness. They did so because someone could profit from it. Land restoration lacks such a mechanism. There’s no “getting rich” incentive tied to fixing degraded land. So, it doesn’t get fixed on a large scale.

The economic incentives run backwards? Agricultural subsidies, land-conversion profits, and extractive commodity pricing reward degradation on a massive scale. Smallholders and pastoralists are asked to restore land as an act of civic virtue, while the market pays others handsomely to destroy it. No amount of moralising will close that gap. Only a shift in what is priced will.

If land restoration were as commercially attractive as mining or industrial agriculture, capital would already be competing for opportunities, driving down costs, and scaling solutions. Its absence is not proof that restoration is intrinsically unprofitable; it proves that no one has yet built the market infrastructure to make it profitable in practice.

The solution is to build a fully functioning global restoration industry—one that fights desertification using the same market dynamics, capital attraction, and technological competition that built the energy and telecommunications sectors.

There is a clear precedent. Thirty years ago, renewable energy was a subsidised curiosity. It became a multi-trillion-dollar industry because governments created a mandatory payer: power utilities were legally required to buy green electricity at bankable prices. Guaranteed revenue attracted private capital, capital spurred technological innovation, and competition drove down the cost of solar power by 90% in a decade. The sequence was simple: market motivation, mandate, payer, capital, cost reduction.

Land restoration needs the same sequence. Today, it lacks a mandatory payer, a reliable price signal, and an aggregation mechanism. Two global instruments could fix this.

First, world leaders should introduce trade-linked demand mechanisms. Just as deforestation rules force firms to verify that commodities were not grown on recently cleared land, parallel regulations for desertification-linked goods—such as cotton, wool, cashmere, meat, and dairy—should make verified non-degradation a condition of market access. This would instantly convert diffuse consumer demand into the mandatory payer restoration lacks.

Second, the world needs a single, trusted measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) standard. Voluntary carbon markets collapsed into scandal because fragmented, poorly audited standards led to over-crediting. Land restoration cannot afford the same blunder. A unified baseline for measuring soil carbon, water retention, and biodiversity—built on satellite remote sensing and independent auditing—would allow capital to move at scale, ensuring a restored hectare in Mongolia is valued identically to one in Australia.

Markets, however, do not emerge fully formed. They require smart industrial policy. As the economist Dani Rodrik has argued, public intervention is essential where environmental externalities are large and uncertainty is high.

To avoid the twin traps of bureaucratic ignorance and political capture, three principles must apply:

• Embeddedness: Governments must work directly with the herders, farmers, and entrepreneurs on the ground to spot real bottlenecks.
• Discipline: State support must be strictly tied to measurable targets (such as falling costs per restored hectare) and include automatic sunset clauses to let failing projects die.
• Accountability: Public funding, audits, and outcomes must be fully transparent.

COP17 cannot build this global market in two weeks. But delegates can refuse to play out the old script. Rather than issuing more voluntary declarations, they should lay the groundwork for market infrastructure, trade rules, and rigorous standards. “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope” will become a reality only when restoring land is something the market, not just the conscience, is forced to reward.

LandRestoration #Desertification #EcologicalEconomics #ClimatePolicy #COP17