Business4Land Champions’ Council Launched at Davos to Spur Private Sector Action on Land and Drought

 The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Secretariat and the UNCCD COP16 Presidency, led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, announced the official launch of the Business4Land (B4L) Champions’ Council at a high-level event during the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos.
 The B4L Champions’ Council brings together global CEOs and senior executives from across the agriculture, fashion, food, paper, mining, building materials and other sectors highly dependent on land resources. It aims to drive private sector leadership to work together to promote restoration and sustainable land management, restoring 1.5 billion hectares of degraded land by 2030—aligning business ambition with the global SDG goals for land degradation neutrality.
 “Half of GDP depends on land because our fresh water is on land, our farms are on land, our forests are on land, our cities are on land, our villages are on land, our roads are on land. Yet every year, 100 million hectares of land are degraded because of business as usual. We need to shift to business unusual,” said Deputy Minister for Environment at the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture and Advisor to the COP16 President Dr. Osama Faqeeha. “We cannot do it without the business community. We need to have a major shift in our attitude to land and redesign our spending. The good news is that by investing in land, there is no losing, there is only winning,” he added.
 The council will support B4L actions aligned with the Riyadh Action Agenda to catalyze actions from the private sector, launched at COP16 in Riyadh, where over $12 billion was pledged for land restoration and drought resilience, including contributions from the Arab Coordination Group, the Islamic Development Bank, the OPEC Fund, and the Government of Saudi Arabia. The B4L Champions’ Council will build on this momentum through coordinated business action.
 “There is a cost for inaction, and there is a huge revenue that will come with action: for each dollar spent on land, it would generate around 30 dollars in revenue,” said Executive Secretary of UNCCD Yasmine Fouad. “The B4L initiative is the only official and formal private sector platform out of the UN conventions, from climate change to biodiversity that actually now exists. This is not a voluntary contribution; it is a part of Corporate Social Responsibility,” she added.