Ambition Loop

Agriculture is becoming more connected, automated and precise.

Electric machinery, autonomous equipment and digital tools are expanding the ways farmers can manage field operations, improve efficiency and make more targeted use of resources.

The opportunity is not simply to add more technology to agriculture. It is to use innovation to make better decisions: where to act, how much to apply, when to intervene and how to reduce unnecessary inputs and operations.

Electrification can also become part of that transition, particularly where electric equipment replaces fossil-fuel machinery and is supported by increasingly clean energy systems.

The challenge now is adoption: making these technologies accessible, useful and appropriate across different farms, regions and production systems.

What happens when precision, automation and lower-emission technologies become part of the way agriculture is designed from the start?

Three hundred kilometres west of Ulaanbaatar, the steppe still looks the way it has for millennia: open grassland, gers on the horizon, herds of cattle, yak, goats, sheep, horses and camels moving across it.

That fertility is the quiet engine behind entire food systems. Grasslands turn soil and rain into pasture, and pasture into meat, milk, leather and wool — and into a way of life carried across Mongolia, and across the drylands of Africa, Latin America and Asia.

But ground grazed hard for too long can cross a line. Herding here began roughly 3,500 years ago; push a landscape past what it can carry, and fertile earth turns to sand. What’s lost isn’t only vegetation. It’s the soil’s ability to hold water, feed hydrological cycles, and grow the plants that people and animals depend on.

Up to 40% of the world’s land is already degraded, affecting more than 3.2 billion people, according to UNCCD. When grassland becomes desert, a culture is endangered — and so is the food and water security of everyone downstream, in a world heading toward 10 billion people.

That’s the question underneath the whole conversation: how to stop soil degradation and keep the ground alive enough to feed us all.

This is the thread we’re carrying into New York Climate Week. If the line between grassland and desert runs through our dinner plates, how close are we standing to it?

Rangelands ClimateWeekNYC AmbitionLoop

We asked about the biggest initiative on the Riyadh Action Agenda Community Platform and one name comes up fast: UCLG

The network of United Cities and Local Governments represents around 5 billion people, roughly 70% of the world’s population, according to UCLG. When an initiative at that scale joins, the numbers move in a way that’s hard to picture.

And on the same platform, a handful of trees planted by friends counts too. Constanza’s point: the tiny and the enormous carry equal weight, and both add to the same total.

Where does change really start, at the top, or on the ground?

What are these big international summits actually for?

We asked Constanza Montenegro, an internationalist, at COP17. To coordinate. To inspire. To learn.

Every region faces its own challenges. Coming together in one place lets you see what’s working elsewhere, borrow those ideas, and move faster on your own.

What’s a solution from another part of the world you’d like to see working in yours?

AmbitionLoop

Two years ago in Riyadh, the conversation was about a big idea. This time in Ulaanbaatar, it’s about results.

Constanza Montenegro has now been to both COPs. In between, two years of work became something concrete: the Riyadh Action Agenda Community Platform, which brings together more than 200 initiatives from every sector, civil society, the private sector, banks, foundations, Indigenous peoples, all moving toward the same goals on land restoration, finance and drought resilience.

Real collaboration is every kind of actor pointing in the same direction.

What makes a collaboration actually work?

AmbitionLoop

Ulaanbaatar wears its history in layers, all visible from the same street.

A fitting host for UNCCD COP17, where the conversation was about land, and how we restore it.

More than half of the world’s population already lives in cities, a share expected to reach 68% by 2050, according to UN DESA. That makes the way cities grow, use land and connect with their surrounding landscapes an increasingly important part of the solution.

At COP17, the Ulaanbaatar Initiative took that conversation a step further: testing a practical way for cities to measure and report land degradation.

What could our cities do differently to help restore the land they depend on?

AmbitionLoop

At this year’s UNCCD COP17, one topic is generating serious debate: synergies between the three Rio Conventions, climate, biodiversity, and land.

It’s not new. Cooperation across these conventions has been building for years, with strong signals from governments and stakeholders pushing for action that tackles land degradation while also delivering wins for climate and biodiversity.

2025 marks the start of a “Silk Road” of triple COPs, from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to Yerevan (Armenia) in October, to Antalya (Turkiye) in November, each an opportunity for parties to strengthen joint action across the Paris Agreement, the Global Biodiversity Framework, and the UNCCD Strategic Framework.

Add to that the momentum from the Belém Joint Statement on the Rio Conventions, aligning initiatives across society toward one goal: land, climate, and biodiversity action that works together, not in silos.

The outcome of these negotiations is still uncertain, but the direction of travel is clear. 🌱

Follow along as we track the road from Mongolia to Ethiopia.

Biodiversity Synergies AmbitionLoop

The money exists. The projects exist. They just can’t find each other.

That’s the gap Ambition Loop is closing.

All over the world, projects are raising their hands: We’re here. We have proven capability. We just don’t know where to go for funding.

And on the other side, capital is waiting, private and public, investment funds, aggregated capital ready to move today, with no clear line of sight to the projects that need it.

We built a platform to bring those two worlds together. It mobilises capital for nature-based solutions: projects restoring natural capacity, lifting productive capacity, healing water cycles, growing biodiversity, building soil health. And projects rooted in the bioeconomy, working with the communities who have been the guardians of these lands all along.

We’ve piloted it for nearly a year. This month, in Medellín, it goes public.

📍 UNCCD COP17 · Ulaanbaatar

AmbitionLoop

Time is running out, but momentum is building.

At UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, voices from around the world are coming together around a shared goal: protecting and restoring the land we all depend on.

Every region brings its own story. Every community brings its own knowledge. And together, they remind us that lasting change takes many hands, many perspectives, and a commitment that spans generations.

The challenges are urgent. The solutions are already in motion.

📍 UNCCD COP17 · Ulaanbaatar