Scared Monkeys Discussion Forum

So what has our Supreme Leader done? He has abruptly withdrawn our country from something called the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of this important body, because neither has anybody else. But everyone is outraged just the same.

But the really incomprehensible part is why the UNCCD is still around at all. After it was set up in 1994, as an offshoot of the Rio Earth Summit, every nation signed on. Since then it has accomplished nothing, unless you count endless conferences, consultations and reports as something. The UNCCD took 13 years to come up with a 10-year plan. Its documents are full of urgent calls for more synergy, more interlinkages and more networking with stakeholders. But if it has ever saved a single farmer or redeemed one hectare of drought-stricken land, there’s no evidence of it.

In other words, the UNCCD is like a lot of other UN bodies. The best you can say for it is that it hasn’t actually done harm (which is more than you can say for the UN Human Rights Council, to choose a particularly egregious example).

Richard Thomas, an official with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told me that, like all UN environmental bodies, the UNCCD has been plagued by inertia since the start.