A new report released at UNCCD COP17 says rangelands generate an estimated $21tn-$47tn in benefits every year, but remain largely overlooked in land and climate finance.
Rangelands cover 54% of the Earth’s land surface, support 500 million pastoralists and are home to a third of the world’s most important biodiversity areas.
The report says restoration typically returns $4-$6 for every dollar spent, rising to as much as $36 when wider public benefits such as water supply are counted.
It calls for rangelands to be included more clearly in national climate plans, land restoration finance and drought resilience strategies.
Rangelands generate an estimated $21 trillion to $47 trillion in benefits every year, according to a new report released on August 24, 2026 at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The value of rangelands can reach up to $5,000 per hectare each year, challenging the long-held assumption that pastoralism is primarily a driver of land degradation, the report found.
These landscapes cover more than half the Earth’s land surface and are home to a third of the world’s most important biodiversity areas. Despite representing one of the biggest untapped opportunities in land restoration investment, they remain largely overlooked by governments and investors deciding where land and climate finance should go, the report said.
This year’s COP, held during the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, has placed financing for land restoration and drought resilience at the centre of its agenda. August 24, was designated Finance Day at the conference, with ministerial dialogues focused on innovative financial mechanisms for healthy land and drought resilience. The report added new evidence to those discussions.
Rangelands are natural and semi-natural grazing ecosystems that include grasslands, savannas, shrublands and open woodlands. They cover 54 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and support 500 million pastoralists, while providing ecosystem services, biodiversity and cultural and natural heritage.
The report, Rangelands Rising: Investing in Sustainable Management and Restoration, was produced by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative, UNCCD and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It argued that rangelands should be treated as an asset worth investing in, rather than as degraded land to be converted or managed away.
The report estimated the annual economic cost of land degradation at about $300 billion under current business-as-usual trends. It warned that this cost will increase as degradation becomes self-reinforcing beyond certain ecological tipping points.
More broadly, degraded rangelands are draining trillions of dollars in lost ecosystem services each year, it said. Meanwhile, restoration typically generates returns of $4 to $6 for every dollar spent, and up to $36 for every dollar once public benefits such as water supply are included, according to the report.
One of the report’s clearest examples comes from Jordan, where reviving a traditional practice of resting grazing land returned just $0.80 for every dollar invested by herders themselves. But the same intervention delivered an 18-to-one return for Jordanian society as a whole, driven largely by groundwater recharge.
This gap between who bears the cost and who receives the benefits runs through rangeland restoration, the report said.
Pastoralists are already the main investors in rangelands, contributing labour, knowledge, livestock and generations of stewardship. But they receive only a fraction of the value they generate for wider society, it said. Public investment is needed to close this gap and reward stewardship already under way, which could in turn help attract private capital, the report argues.
“We are not asking for rangelands to be treated as a special case. We are asking for them to be counted. A landscape worth up to $47 trillion a year cannot remain a blank space on the investment map,” said Jonathan Davies, co-author of the report and an independent rangelands researcher.
The scale of the funding gap remains substantial. As of 2025, the private sector supplies only about 6 per cent of global financing directed at combating land degradation and drought, the report said.
It attributes this shortfall largely to the absence of rangelands from mainstream investment and policy frameworks. Climate-related blended finance reached $15.5 billion across 84 deals in 2024, the second-highest total in six years, according to data cited in the report.
But the report says too little of that capital has so far reached rangelands and calls for a more deliberate redirection of blended finance towards the sector.
The report identified climate policy as one of the areas where rangelands’ neglect is most visible. Under the Paris Agreement, the term “rangelands” appears in the national climate plans of just 24 countries. By comparison, “forests” appear in the plans of 181 countries.
The report said this gap ignores two major climate functions rangelands already perform. Healthy grasslands can act as a global net carbon sink, storing much of their carbon underground in soil rather than in visible biomass. That carbon can be released when the land degrades.
The landscapes are also among the world’s important natural buffers against drought, improving water infiltration and recharging aquifers. The report cautioned that forest-focused restoration targets can carry the risk of planting trees on natural grasslands that were never forest ecosystems. Such afforestation, it says, can damage the ecosystems that restoration efforts are meant to repair.
The report stressed that its climate case rests on extensive pastoral grazing of natural rangelands, not intensive, grain-fed livestock production.
The report also challenged how governments budget for drought. Relief spending is often reactive and may arrive months into a crisis, after herders have already begun losing livestock.
The costs can be high. The report cites Niger’s 2021 drought, when relief spending was estimated at 7 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, or GDP.
One evaluation cited in the report found that every dollar spent on timely early support saves about three dollars in later humanitarian costs.
The report urges finance ministries and funders to shift spending away from crisis response and towards resilient rangeland management before drought strikes.
The recommendation comes amid wider finance discussions at COP17, where countries are considering how to attract private capital into land restoration and drought resilience, while also scaling up public funding for a problem historically treated more as a humanitarian crisis than a development priority.
The report said the best returns do not necessarily come from restoring the most severely degraded land. Instead, it suggested intervening early on lightly to moderately degraded rangelands, where restoration can cost as little as $20 per hectare.
By contrast, restoring land that has deteriorated badly can cost more than $70,000 per hectare, the report says. It also warns against interventions that appear “green” but work against dryland ecology, such as planting trees on natural grassland or converting rangeland to cropland. In most drylands, the report argues, the more effective approach is to strengthen existing pastoral systems.
The report sets out three broad pathways to 2030 and 2050. Under a business-as-usual scenario, current rates of degradation continue and investment remains insufficient, pushing the cost of inaction beyond today’s $300 bn a year.
An incremental scaling scenario, involving expanded restoration programmes, modest policy reform and growing but fragmented private investment that is closer to current ambition levels in most countries, would bring measurable but partial improvements. However, the report says this would still fall short of what is needed to meet global climate and biodiversity commitments.
A transformational pathway would involve large-scale blended finance, rangeland targets built into national climate plans, and pastoral communities empowered as the designers and managers of restoration rather than treated as its subjects.
The report is explicit that reaching this third pathway depends on political will and financing decisions being made now, at forums like COP17, rather than on any further gap in scientific evidence.
The report pushed back against the long-standing view that mobile livestock herding degrades land. A growing body of research instead shows that many rangelands evolved alongside grazing, and that pastoral systems, managed well, have helped create and sustain some of the planet’s most biodiverse landscapes.
That balance is now under pressure from intensifying drought, cropland expansion, urban sprawl and the fragmentation of grazing routes.
“For too long, the world has looked at rangelands and seen empty, degraded land, and looked at pastoralists and seen a problem to be fixed,” said Professor Appolinaire Djikeng, director general of ILRI. “The evidence tells a different story. These are among the most valuable landscapes on Earth, and the people who manage them are their frontline investors.”
Rangelands already underpin food systems, producing meat, milk and other high-value protein from land largely unsuited to cropping without expensive inputs.
The report points to Sub-Saharan Africa as a case in point: pastoralism there contributes an estimated 5-10 per cent of national GDP and 15-40 per cent of agricultural value added. Once indirect benefits such as manure, draught power, and the savings and insurance role livestock play for herding families are counted, livestock’s economic contribution rises by roughly 50 per cent.
“Rangelands are not marginal landscapes. They cover more than half of the world’s land and are fundamental to food security, biodiversity, water security and resilience to drought," said Barron Joseph Orr, UNCCD chief scientist.
“This report shows that investing in rangelands is not simply about restoring degraded land. It is about recognising the value of these ecosystems and supporting the pastoralists whose knowledge and management have sustained them for generations. As governments gather at UNCCD COP17, the evidence provides a strong case for putting rangelands more firmly into land restoration, drought resilience and investment decisions.”