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Drylands landscape near Kitui, Kitui County - Kenya. Credit: Axel Fassio/CIFOR

By Éliane Ubalijoro and Salina Abraham
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 1 2026 (IPS)

Open a can of something fizzy and the reason the sugar doesn’t separate immediately is gum arabic, tapped by hand from acacia trees across the Sahel. Spray on perfume and the reason the scent is still there at dinner is frankincense, a resin cut from Boswellia trees on the dry escarpments of the Horn of Africa. The fat that gives a chocolate bar its snap may well be shea, gathered and pressed by women in the parkland belt of West Africa. The cashmere jumper came from goats that can only be raised on cold, dry rangelands.

These are drylands. They cover 44 per cent of the planet’s land, hold 44 per cent of the world’s cropland and half its livestock, and two billion people live in them. We have spent decades describing them as empty or unproductive. For a long list of things most of us use without thinking, they are the only places on earth that produce them at all.

It is no secret that our world is becoming hotter and drier. Three quarters of the planet’s land experienced drier conditions in the last 30 years than the previous 30. This year’s El Niño is intensifying fast, compelling the world to look back at what dryland systems already know. Nearly every model now points to a record-strength event: the US Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of a “very strong” El Niño at over 90 per cent for this fall and winter, and a 69 per cent chance it exceeds anything on record since 1950.

Drylands have been living through exactly this kind of shock-and-recovery cycle for generations, and their playbook offers real lessons. Farmers in places that have always been able to count on rain are beginning to face a question that dryland farmers answered generations ago: what do you grow, and how, when the water is not guaranteed?

Dryland systems are the longest-running operating record anywhere of producing value under conditions of scarcity, volatility and shock. These landscapes are home to generations of knowledge on how to thrive with limited water and high variability. This includes practices such as spreading risk across several crops and animals rather than betting the season on one, understanding land closely enough to move livestock before the pressure is too much, and building income that arrives at different times of the year so a bad month is not a ruined one. These are powerful lessons needed now.

Now is the time to listen and learn from dryland communities, practices, and regenerative production models. When this wisdom, data, and experience serve as our foundation, we can transition to sustainable business models and unlock investments to power our future world using knowledge that already exists in the places we have been calling marginal.

Mongolia, the host of the recently concluded UN’s COP17 talks under the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), is a case in point. Three quarters of Mongolia’s land is already classified as degraded or at risk. However, Mongolian herders supply 40 per cent of the world’s raw cashmere, increasingly innovating to shift away from an extractive model to practices that generate diverse value, from wool to grass-fed meat, examples of what a healthy landscape can offer.

In northern Ghana, the Ojoba Women’s Shea Cooperative processes shea butter by hand in the arid Upper East Region, using a skill passed down through generations. They now supply international buyers including L’Occitane and Lush.

In both instances, the land already had value, and the skills already existed within the communities. What was missing was a route to the market willing to pay for them. These initiatives demonstrate what is possible when investment is designed around the realities and value in drylands.

Investment can take many forms: from financing cooperatives through the shift to new practices; insurance that pays out on rainfall; water and energy infrastructure that keeps a harvest sellable in extreme heat. There is growth potential beyond raw commodities too; processing into oils, powders, waxes compounds the returns. And payments for ecosystem services, from stored carbon, biodiversity and watershed protection, sit alongside that.

Donors like the European Union have already recognised the value of drylands with the €20 million Thrivelands initiative, led by Landscape Alliance, to build the coalitions and action this work needs; including innovations needed to protect and restore land. These innovations range from the tools to monitor and restore soil health accurately to the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework and the Regreening Africa app, which brings this data into the hands of farmers.

But public funding alone cannot unlock the drylands opportunities. Adapting to a drier world means restoring a broken nature finance system and closing the $700 billion finance gap to apply proven expertise across a growing area.

Many companies already depend on drylands through what they source, without having assessed how much of their supply comes from them. For those in the agrifood, textiles, and cosmetics sectors, investing in restoring and protecting these landscapes is a way to stabilise their supply chains, manage growing levels of risk and meet climate goals.

There is also the question of what inaction costs. Investing in drylands agriculture could avert a 12 per cent reduction in global food production over the next 25 years and prevent the release of about 60 per cent of stored carbon.

COP17 is a reminder of how little time is left. The UNCCD finance framework closes in 2030, with 82 per cent of the cumulative need for finance unmet. Time is running out to leverage the lessons from drylands to protect future food security. The gap between what is needed and what is being invested remains enormous.

The landscapes on which our future depends may be getting drier, but they are not devoid of opportunity. With science and innovation that enhances traditional knowledge, they are saturated with opportunities to bolster food security and climate resilience.

Dr Éliane Ubalijoro, chief executive officer of Landscape Alliance
Salina Abraham, Head of Thrivelands, Landscape Alliance

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Sep 1 2026 (IPS)

The US dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency has been eroding gradually for decades. However, various US policies, including recent deliberately unexpected actions, have at times accelerated de-dollarisation.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Dollarisation
Despite warnings from Keynes and others about its likely problems, Harry Dexter White, the head US delegate, imposed an indirect gold standard at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference.

By fixing the gold price in dollars, the US currency became the world’s reserve currency, with other currencies pegged to it at fixed exchange rates. With this indirect gold standard, the metal’s price was fixed in US dollars.

Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, strengthening its role as the dominant currency. Other arrangements that could have mitigated the problems and adverse consequences of the dollar system were effectively rejected by the US at Bretton Woods.

Ninety per cent of foreign exchange market transactions now still involve the dollar. Most central bank reserves are still denominated in dollars, while the US dollar is still used to invoice around two-fifths of international trade.

Just after World War II (WW2), the US economy accounted for a quarter of world output, measured in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and even more in nominal terms. The US share of the world economy has fallen to under 15% since.

The US also accounted for a quarter of world exports at that time. Unlike most other nations, US industry was strengthened rather than destroyed during WW2.

The size, liquidity, and depth of US capital markets have also reinforced the dollar’s role. Its special status in the Bretton Woods dispensation conferred an ‘exorbitant privilege’, increasing international demand for dollar bonds.

This has enabled the US government and companies to borrow at lower interest rates than others. The resulting increase in demand for dollar-denominated assets has also strengthened the greenback.

Erosion of dollar dominance
Since then, the US economy has become much more financialised and de-industrialised, now accounting for less than a tenth of world goods exports.

However, although the US now accounts for under 15% of global income at PPP, its stock market still accounts for over three-fifths of the world’s total market capitalisation.

Leading international monetary economist Barry Eichengreen’s 2022 survey of central banks’ foreign exchange reserves showed the dollar share of foreign reserves falling from 70% in 2000 to under 60% in 2021; it has since declined to below 58% in early 2025.

Ben Norton suggests that the actual dollar share of foreign reserves is even lower and continues to decline. Some central banks hold other reserves off the books for fear of Western actions to freeze and seize their foreign reserves.

With the US economy more de-industrialised and financialised, the dollar system has become more important in attracting foreign investors and inducing capital market bubbles from time to time.

De-dollarisation accelerating
De-dollarisation goes back many decades, even when the dollar-gold peg was still in place. France famously demanded gold for dollars, then shipped bullion back under armed escort.

Many recent Trump policies have heightened international concerns about holding dollar-denominated assets. Greater Washington belligerence, including illegal tariffs, sanctions and bombings, has also accelerated de-dollarisation.

Trump’s attempts to influence the US Federal Reserve Bank and other public surveillance and regulatory institutions have also shaken public and international trust. Humiliating dismissals of allegedly recalcitrant officials have not helped.

In the first half-year of Trump’s second presidential term, the dollar experienced its biggest fall since the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, by over 10% against other major currencies, before fluctuating considerably.

After Trump threatened massive tariffs against all other countries on 2 April 2025, fears of “a simultaneous collapse in the prices of all US assets” quickly grew.

Instead of the usual ‘flight to safety’ in dollar assets when crises previously loomed, it seems “The market has lost faith in US assets”, selling them down in response to new threats and uncertainties.

Since then, uncertainties have worsened market and dollar volatility worldwide. Unsurprisingly, foreign governments and investors are looking for alternatives to the dollar.

Eichengreen had previously expected a gradual decline in dollar dominance and a slow transition to a more balanced multi-currency reserve system.

Although the US president is not the sole cause of the recent acceleration of de-dollarisation, Trump 2.0 policies have prompted monetary authorities worldwide to consider alternatives to the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

More recently, Eichengreen has warned of a likely acceleration in the dollar’s decline, expressing concern about its adverse effects. That would threaten financial institutions holding dollar-denominated assets, causing them to lose value in foreign-currency terms.

No alternative?
However, Eichengreen insists “no other currency … is positioned to fill the dollar’s shoes”. Neither the euro nor the renminbi has the capacity or ambition to replace the dollar.

With privately issued cryptocurrencies not functioning as currencies except for mainly illicit transactions, Eichengreen expects the dollar to remain “the cleanest dirty shirt in the pile”.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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M. M.