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.

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.

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For more information, please contact Souad Agnaou, Vice President of the High Atlas Foundation, at:

souad.ag@highatlasfoundation.org

Tel. and WhatsApp: +212 662-075321