Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Türkiye Pavilion, UNCCD COP17, 24 August 2026
Dear colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Good afternoon and welcome to our CICA panel. As a courtesy to our hosts, let me briefly switch to Turkish.
I sincerely thank our Turkish colleagues, led today by Ms Fatma Varank, Deputy Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, for hosting this panel session and providing this beautiful national pavilion of Türkiye (in Turkish).
I am also grateful to the Ambassador of Kazakhstan in Mongolia H.E. Almas Seitakynov – representing CICA’s initiator state and its host country – for joining us today despite his busy schedule and multiple engagements.
Many thanks to all of you - representatives of CICA Member States, international organizations, researchers and experts. Looking around, I believe we have exactly the right informal setting for what this panel was meant to be: not a series of formal statements, but an exchange of experience and practical ideas.
COP17 provides an excellent opportunity for that. Speaking of UNCCD, it is quite symbolic that this UN Convention was adopted on 17 June 1994. While CICA was initiated from the high-level rostrum of the UN General Assembly around the same historic period – in 1992 – the CICA Secretariat was established on exactly same date, only in 2006, by the decision of the Second Summit. Furthermore, in 2007, CICA was granted a formal status of a UN General Assembly Observer, which we have been proudly enjoying ever since.
Ladies and gentlemen!
Across Asia, our landscapes could hardly be more diverse — from forests and mountains to steppes, deserts, wetlands and vast rangelands. Yet they face increasingly interconnected pressures from climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss and drought. This is why today’s theme — Sustainable land management and ecosystem restoration — matters so much for CICA.
Our 28 Member States cover almost 90 per cent of Asia. This enormous geographical diversity also gives us an enormous diversity of experience. Across the CICA region, countries are testing different approaches to restoring degraded land and forests, managing water resources, protecting biodiversity, applying new technologies and strengthening resilience to drought.
For CICA, there is a crucial aspect of today’s discussion. We are, first and foremost, a confidence-building organization, which is enshrined in the very name of CICA. And confidence is not built only around negotiating tables. It is also built when countries share knowledge, compare practical solutions and discover that an experience developed in one part of Asia may be useful in another.
Our Member States have already been putting this approach into practice. The first-ever CICA Ministerial Conference on Environmental Issues, held in August 2024 under the Kazakh Chairmanship, resulted in a High-Level Statement. In this historic document, CICA Member States emphasized cooperation and exchange of best practices on climate adaptation, reversing biodiversity loss, sustainable water management and ecosystem management, while recognizing the need to conserve our natural resources and mitigate environmental risks. These commitments provide a natural foundation for the issues we are discussing here — where sustainable land management and restoration are essential to protecting ecosystems and strengthening their resilience. The current Azerbaijani Chairmanship is building on this foundation and the legacy of its UNFCCC COP29 Presidency, including by bringing CICA’s regional experience to wider international platforms. This was the approach at the Regional Ecological Summit in Astana in April this year, where Member States and partners discussed practical solutions for climate resilience, ecosystem restoration and adaptation, and earlier at the International Conference on Glaciers’ Preservation in Dushanbe in May 2025.
These are precisely the kind of synergies we hope to explore today. We look forward to hearing different but closely connected perspectives: on the links between drought resilience, healthy rangelands and food security; on Türkiye’s experience in restoring forests and rangelands; on monitoring land degradation neutrality as a basis for sustainable management practices; and on forest and rangeland restoration across Central Asia. Together, these perspectives should help us look at the same challenge from different angles — from monitoring and policy to practical restoration, and from national experience to wider regional cooperation.
Holding this discussion here at COP17, and at the COP31 pavilion of Turkiye, gives these questions a wider context. Taking this opportunity, I congratulate and wish every success to the Turkish colleagues with its upcoming COP31 in Antalya and stand ready to contribute, if deemed appropriate by the host side.
While the UNCCD or UNFCCC or any other UN instrument provides the global framework; CICA brings experiences from different parts of Asia together, connects regional dialogue with global efforts and, wherever possible, helps turn dialogue into practical cooperation.
With that, I am pleased to hand the floor over to our moderator and panelists.
I wish you a lively and productive discussion. Thank you.
