I recently attended the UNCCD CSO Panel webinar on key findings from global consultations and the outcomes of Désertif’actions 2026. The discussion offered a clear and urgent message, which is that drought can no longer be treated as a temporary emergency to be managed after damage is already underway. It must be approached as a structural challenge that continuously reshapes land, water, livelihoods, and governance across entire territories.

The webinar highlighted that drought’s impacts reach far beyond immediate water scarcity. They include biodiversity loss, declining soil health, weakening ecosystem services, and long term reductions in land productivity. The urgency, then, is not simply to deliver emergency relief. It is to secure water, support climate-resilient livelihoods, and restore the ecosystems that sustain human and agricultural life. The Désertif’actions water note also argues that increasingly frequent and intense droughts expose the limits of approaches based only on expanding supply or relying on ad hoc technical fixes, and that water security depends on institutional, social, and political arrangements that support equitable decision-making.

One of the strongest themes in the webinar was the need for a systemic shift from reactive crisis response to proactive and preventive drought management. That shift depends on better coordination across water, agriculture, land, and climate governance. The UNCCD briefing note helps explain why this matters. COP decisions guide implementation through strategic, scientific, financial, institutional, and operational directions, and civil society can influence those decisions through statements, intersessional work, and collective advocacy processes.

This insight is strongly aligned with the High Atlas Foundation’s (HAF) participatory development model, which integrates agriculture, irrigation, clean water, women’s empowerment, and local planning as part of a broader development process. HAF works with communities across Morocco, its 9 nurseries produce more than two million saplings each year in 50+ provinces, and it has planted more than 5 million trees since 2003 in partnership with farmers, cooperatives, and schools. It took HAF 11 years to plant its first million trees with farming families in Morocco, to finally now reach this level of production. With strong connections with local communities, HAF has supported 17,000 farming families with affordable saplings and hands-on support in the 2021 to 2024 planting seasons, while 4,000 farmers obtained organic certification with HAF’s support.

What stayed with me most after the webinar is that resilience is something cultivated together. It is cultivated in restored soil, in protected water, in communities deciding together how they will care for the future. For the High Atlas Foundation, these ideas are visible across Morocco in the steady work of planting, organizing, empowering, and rebuilding with communities. Drought may reveal the fragility of our ecological systems, but it also reveals the strength that emerges when people and land are renewed together. That is the key message this webinar opened, and it is one that HAF is helping bring into practice.