What if climate, nature, and land were financed together?

On 28 October in Yerevan, the presidencies of the UN's biodiversity, desertification, and climate summits signed a joint declaration stating that "fragmented and siloed responses are insufficient, costly, and increase trade-offs."  A week earlier, the UN said for the first time that breaching the 1.5°C warming limit is imminent and unavoidable. 

Yet, the resources for responding to these crises are shrinking, just as climate shocks compound economic ones. Simon O’Connell, CEO of SNV, calls this the shock economy, where “wars are repricing inputs and closing trade corridors, while aid withdrawal is removing the scaffolding.”   

Much of the pressure falls on smallholder farmers, fishers, and pastoralists, yet small-scale agri-food systems received 0.8% of tracked climate finance in 2019/20. If one drought or one change in farming practice touches climate, nature, food systems, and landscapes together, why does one budget pay for carbon, another for forest, and a third for soil?

The three Rio Conventions trace back to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which opened the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for signature, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) followed in 1994. In 2026, all three meet within four months: Ulaanbaatar in August, Yerevan in October, and Antalya from 9 November. 

Each COP also requires its own national plan: Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for climate, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) for nature, and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets for land. These are often run by different ministries, funded separately, and measured against different indicators.  

Mitigation and adaptation are often split, though the UN Environment Programme saysthey must now advance together. Capital needs to be refocused too: for every euro invested in protecting nature, about €30 flows into activities that harm it. The architecture is split three ways, but the landscape it governs is not. 

Many farmers and pastoralists already deliver all three agendas at once, through agroforestry, soil and water stewardship, and locally adapted livestock, while policy and finance count those outcomes separately. Soil organic carbon, for instance, is a core LDN indicator and tracked under the Global Biodiversity Framework, but NDCs do not consistently report it; Armenia frames its LDN target as a 1.5% rise in soil organic carbon by 2040, a measure that could serve all three plans. 

The obstacle is less the volume of money than how it moves. A June workshop on the Rio Conventions and agrifood systems in Bonn concluded that “the financing constraint is qualitative rather than quantitative”. 

Phuc Sinh, a leading Vietnamese coffee exporter with a turnover of roughly US$300 million (€270 million), needs intensive capital investment for every expansion. A new Central Highlands sourcing area meant untested supply and buyers demanding deforestation-free coffee.  

After an SNV grant of €367,500 and technical support, FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, signed a US$15 million (€13.5 million) package in April 2025. More than 7,000 smallholders now farm over 10,000 hectares sustainably, using agroforestry that shades coffee, builds soil carbon, and eases pressure on nearby forest, serving adaptation, mitigation, biodiversity, and land health at once. Participating households earned up to 36% more than conventional farmers. 

In Côte d’Ivoire, SODEN is preparing a 76-megawatt plant fuelled by cocoa waste from up to 36,000 smallholders. A €500,000 Origination Facility grant supports farmer training and demonstration orchards to renew ageing plantations, so farms earn more and supply more biomass. The plant is expected to avoid about 173,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. 

Both deals work because a company earns a return from the outcomes. Many Rio Conventions do not. Restored watersheds, connected habitats, and communities better able to absorb drought benefit a whole landscape, but no single investor captures the return. 

"Investment follows the easiest path," says William MacFarland, Climate Adaptation Advisor. "Biodiversity and adaptation outcomes are local, so someone has to pay to fix the problem in a particular place." 

As lenders increasingly treat climate risk as a material liability, de-risking instruments become highly significant. Yet outcomes such as local resilience, adaptive capacity, and biodiversity gains stay under-financed because they fall outside conventional investment metrics. 

In Yerevan, SNV called for planning, financing, implementing, and measuring together. That means joint priorities across NDCs, NBSAPs, and LDN targets for governments, adaptation and biodiversity metrics in deal criteria for lenders, and, for funders, paying for origination and landscape coordination as standing infrastructure. 

The Yerevan declaration invites countries to join the COP31 Presidency's Rio Synergies Group for Action by naming at least one "nationally determined flagship action" across climate, biodiversity, and land.  

The Rio Conventions will be judged less by their declarations than by whether governments, funders, and investors work alongside farmers, cooperatives, and local businesses to build resilience around shared climate, nature, and land goals.