August 2026
Conference note
Naranzaya Batsaikhan
Co-founder
Notes from COP17: what Ulaanbaatar means for mine land and solar
I spent UNCCD COP17 in the blue zone. Three things came up in almost every session I attended, and all three matter to the work we are doing.
The first mining forum at a UNCCD COP
COP17 was the first time the convention hosted a dedicated mining forum. That is a change in itself. Land degradation and mine closure have been discussed in separate rooms for years. In Ulaanbaatar they were on the same agenda.
The argument I heard repeatedly was that closure planning should begin with what the land will be used for afterwards, rather than with what has to be removed. That is the same argument we make when we assess a site for solar.
Climate finance is ahead of the projects
Several sessions covered the financing gap for land restoration. The pattern in Mongolia is unusual, because the money has arrived before the pipeline. The Mongolia Green Finance Corporation launched this month with $50 million in Green Climate Fund seed capital. ADB has approved a $100 million policy-based loan for renewable energy. EBRD invested $218 million in Mongolia in 2025, 53% of it in the green economy.
What is scarce is not capital. It is projects prepared well enough to receive it. The financiers I spoke to described the same bottleneck: too few originators who can take a site from an idea to a document a credit committee will read.
Business4Land and the private sector question
Business4Land, the UNCCD’s private sector platform, put the point directly. Restoration at the scale the convention targets cannot be paid for from public budgets alone. It needs business models where restoration is a by-product of something that earns.
Mine-to-solar is one of those models. The generation pays for the site work, and the restoration obligation is discharged by the same activity that produces the electricity. A mining company holding a closure provision and a developer looking for buildable land want the same hectares treated the same way.
The evidence caught up
Research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University was presented showing that photovoltaic arrays on degraded land speed up recovery rather than compete with it. At the Kubuqi Desert, plant productivity rose by 110 gC/m² and water-use efficiency doubled under the panels. Since 2017, 92% of new Chinese desert solar plants have been built in ecological construction mode.
This matters because the objection we hear most often is that solar takes land out of restoration. On degraded ground the measurements say the opposite.
What we take from it
Mongolia has 77% of its land degraded, and a share of that is mine land with an owner who has a legal duty to restore it. COP17 did not create that situation. It did make it a mainstream conversation, which is useful for a small company doing this work.
We came back with a shorter list than expected. Keep assessing sites. Keep the work documented to a standard a lender will accept. Be ready for the point at which a mining company decides its closure provision could do more than sit on a balance sheet.