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Climate change is the global environmental challenge most people know by name. Many have heard of the annual Conference of the Parties, the climate COP, where governments negotiate how to reduce emissions and adapt to a warming world. Fewer people realize that climate change belongs to a family of global challenges and related agreements, on biodiversity, land degradation and desertification ¨C each with its own agendas, its own targets and its own COP.

Over the past three decades, the international community has established dedicated frameworks to address climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation ¨C together known as the Rio Conventions. These three conventions are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Complementing them, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015¨C2030 addresses disaster risk from natural and human-induced hazards. Unlike the Rio Conventions, it is a voluntary, non-binding agreement, yet it is no less important: disaster risk cuts across all three environmental agendas, as climate change, ecosystem degradation and desertification are themselves major drivers of risk. Each of these instruments has distinct mandates, objectives, and governance structures that reflect the complexity of these issues. Their work has been essential for advancing global action within each field.

While the negotiation space is separated, global challenges do not occur in isolation; they are interconnected pressures that amplify one another. Vegetation struggles when it gets hotter and drier and biodiversity declines. As ecosystems degrade or even collapse entirely, soils lose their ability to hold water. Droughts affect land and people, and dry landscapes more often experience wildfires and dust storms. Degraded ecosystems store less carbon, making climate change worse. Although these challenges are addressed through different international agreements, they are experienced as one interconnected reality on the ground, as they affect the same people, landscapes and economies.

Recognizing these interconnections raises an important question: if the challenges are connected, should international agendas and planning not be connected as well?

Many of the underlying processes required to achieve these objectives are remarkably similar. Whether countries prepare National Adaptation Plans, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, Land Degradation Neutrality targets, National Drought Plans or disaster risk reduction strategies, they undertake comparable tasks. They assess risks, identify priorities, engage stakeholders, mobilize finance, monitor progress and translate global commitments into national action.

Despite these common elements, planning often remains organized within institutional and sectoral boundaries. This fragmentation has practical consequences. Separate planning processes may rely on different data, consult similar stakeholders independently, compete for limited financial and technical resources. This could also overlook opportunities where a single intervention could contribute to multiple objectives, or how a single intervention can jeopardize other environmental goals. At a time where environmental change is accelerating, such lack of coordination and duplication of efforts can reduce efficiency and delay action. Planning efforts to address several challenges through coordinated action may, as a result, remain untapped.

This gap has prompted growing discussion about the need for greater coordination across environmental goals and processes. In academia and international policy, this is often described as leveraging synergies.

Although the term can sound technical, the underlying idea is straightforward: If environmental challenges are connected, planning for them should recognize those connections. Rather than designing climate, biodiversity, land and disaster risk reduction policies in isolation, countries can identify opportunities where the same planning process or measure contributes to several objectives at the same time.

For example, sustainable land management, integrated water resource management, ecosystem restoration or nature-based solutions rarely address only one issue. They can improve water security, strengthen biodiversity, reduce disaster risk, support climate adaptation and enhance livelihoods at the same time. Likewise, coordinated risk assessments, monitoring systems and stakeholder engagement processes can provide information that is relevant across multiple planning instruments rather than serving only one. However, these synergies do not emerge automatically; they need to be intentionally considered and built into planning processes so that opportunities for synergies are identified and put into practice.

The challenge now is not to invent a new agenda, but to connect the ones we already have. This means finding ways for existing efforts to work across goals rather than in isolation.

It means , like wetland restoration, to bring disaster risk reduction, climate, land and biodiversity objectives together. It means incorporating strategies like sustainable land management that work towards , when they are otherwise missing. Most importantly, it means making these interconnections explicit in the texts that define how we address these problems.

The Rio Conventions and the Sendai Framework already recognize the importance of collaboration, but we must go deeper. The next step is to make actions more concrete ¨C in policies, in planning and in the decisions that shape how we prepare for and respond to environmental change on the ground. With UNCCD COP17 taking place right now as the first of three Rio Convention COPs in 2026, this is more timely than ever.

The crises we face do not arrive one at a time. They overlap, compound and reinforce one another. Our responses should be able to do the same.