Delivered by Souad Agnaou, Ulaanbaatar,
Mongolia
Vice President of
HAF
August 21,
2026
Sustainable restoration and climate
actions require maximizing opportunities from locality to
locality, that communities identify and implement. We need
to support their empowerment and the projects that they
design and manage, and to do this at a grand scale. This
requires training the people to catalyze and facilitate the
planning and action with women, youth, and all members of
communities to create the enterprises most important to
them, which strengthen the environment, health, education,
and livelihoods.
Morocco gives this kind of space and
freedom for local community actions. But we, like all
nations, need to much better and with more urgency support
communities in their empowerment to inclusively gather and
define and prioritize the projects that reflect their
highest goals, and to direct national and global investments
in this participatory way. We need to co-create and fund the
project proposals with the people directly to ensure their
maximum benefit in this essential directive for our
planet.
Importantly, the High Atlas Foundation (HAF)
at UNCCD COP17 in Mongolia seeks to convey our strategy for
change in relation to carbon offset credits, which places
women, youth, and farming families at the absolute center,
including their planting of endemic fruit and forestry tree
varieties, locally-managed water infrastructure for maximum
conservation and utility, inter-cultural dialogue and
collaboration for human development, full opportunities with
the people of arid and semi-arid environments, and
solidifying south-south unity.
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We believe existing and
upcoming offset Standards, regulatory systems, and global
purchasers of carbon credits need to add value to these
vital qualities to address climate challenges and
opportunities, and enable the people who experience most of
the poverty in the world to retain the potential from their
work and this growing market. We also believe that the value
of carbon credits to the fullest possible extent should take
the form of investments in community-identified and operated
projects to ensure that women, youth, people without land,
families, and groups who have been marginalized across time
are able to have their lives enhanced alongside the whole of
society.
Global environmental unsustainability is most
significantly rooted in the vast inequality within and among
societies. This pervasive condition forms the basis of our
global climatic imbalance. Courageous leadership on the
world and local stages, in all sectors, must place the real
well-being of humanity as the pathway to the success of
their private, public, and civil missions, and the critical
guide for all decisions. We must hold ourselves and each
other accountable. The climate crisis and the preservation
of our best future cannot be sustainably addressed while the
people of the world are intensely socially and economically
stratified.
The success of COP17 commitments should
ultimately be measured by the empowered changes in
people’s lives: Are farming families able to successfully
cope with severe drought? Are women and young people
achieving for themselves much stronger socio-economic and
climate initiatives? Are degraded lands restored by the
people who rely upon them? And are communities supported in
their decisions affecting their land and natural resources,
from identification to implementation, monitoring, and
evaluation?
For us, national and international
commitments only become meaningful when they fully and
widely translate into local community projects, accessible
financing, long-term partnerships, and major results that
people everywhere transformatively
experience.
