“Wisdom begins in wonder” – Socrates.

Dear Climate Healers,

The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the first UNCCD COP that I ever attended, was undoubtedly the most impactful UN COP in my experience. Previously, I had attended the 17th, 21st, 22nd, 26th and 30th COPs of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and I intend to attend its 31st COP in Antalya, Turkey, in November, 2026.

Compared to the UNFCCC COPs, this UNCCD COP was more open to participation from civil society. We were granted two side events in the Blue Zone during the second week and both these events were well attended. Unlike UNFCCC COPs, the official delegates doing all the negotiating and the Press were accessible to civil society and were not walled off behind a second layer of security that makes them unapproachable. Thanks to the excellent local support and connections from the Mongolian team, Rebecca, Jayana and I, were interviewed by several TV stations and reporters. One of our videos, dubbed in Mongolian, has even gone viral, with several hundred thousand views in a nation of 3.6 million.

The UNCCD COP17 Setting

The venue of UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, was located within a national park, which had to be partially paved over and constructed to accommodate 20,000 delegates and 200,000 visitors over the two weeks. While most of the delegates flew in on jet airliners, the people of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, were waiting in hour-long queues to fill up on gasoline/diesel for their cars and motorbikes, a consequence of the global disruption in energy supplies.

Mongolia is not a rich country with a GDP per capita of $4,500 and the people we spoke to were not happy about their government spending an estimated $300M to host COP17. Nevertheless, the people of Mongolia were kind and gracious hosts, very welcoming of the delegates. It seems the government had promised them that Mongolia would get more in investments from COP17 than the money that they spent. Mongolia is at the forefront of the global desertification crisis, with 76% of its land classified as desert just 5 years ago, which has increased to 81% of its land classified as desert today.

The good news is that at the close of COP17, various governments had pledged $1.2B to address Mongolia’s desertification crisis. Let’s pray that these pledges will be fulfilled in a timely manner.

The Dominant Narrative

Just as Jamen and I pointed out in our peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Sustainability, the UN follows the dominant narrative of environmental and social policy, treating each dimension of the PolyCrisis as a separate crisis amenable to a separate solution. Climate change is managed by energy policies. Biodiversity loss is managed by conservation policies. Desertification is managed by Business for Land initiatives. World hunger is managed by food aid. And so on.

Unfortunately, this dominant narrative is flawed. We do not face a series of individual crises amenable to discrete solutions. We face a PolyCrisis, which is a tightly interwoven cluster of 26 existential emergencies, each amplifying the others through dense networks of positive feedback loops, shared drivers, and systemic interdependencies. Addressing any one crisis in isolation does not merely fail to resolve the broader emergency, but it often accelerates other crises within a cluster.

This PolyCrisis is now catastrophically advanced. Seven planetary boundaries have been transgressed, and climate tipping points are being crossed now. Extinction rates match historical great mass extinction events, while our food systems, primarily responsible for over half these crises, simultaneously drive hunger, obesity, chronic diseases and all seven ecological crises.

The Proposed PolySolution Framework

Planet B is our proposed PolySolution framework, a complete alternative Operating System grounded in empirical reality and proven solutions. It integrates animal-free food and material production systems releasing up to 5 billion hectares for rewilding, regenerative economics measuring non-violence and biocapacity, circular economy minimizing waste, technological restraint with democratic governance, seven-generation thinking, and PolyCommunity coordination, collaboration and co-creation of the PolySolution. It calls for the immediate emergency implementation of two planetary-scale solutions: (a) implementing universal, free access to gourmet whole-food, plant-based vegan meals worldwide as a landscape-level shock to reverse the PolyCrisis, eliminating hunger and accelerating food and health systems transformation (“Together Around Food“), and (b) halting planetary overheating through animal agricultural emissions elimination, massive rewilding for carbon sequestration, and comprehensive stabilization of the life-support systems of our planet (“Cool”).

The time to implement the Planet B PolySolution is now. We look to the UN for coordination of this implementation, but there is a glaring missing link in the UN process that I witnessed first-hand at UNCCD COP17 in Mongolia. It is the only COP in which our team was allowed to directly supply free Vegan meals to the negotiating delegates from the various nations. These delegates were separated into two categories:
A) Science delegates; and
B) Political delegates.

The Missing Link at UN COPs

The Missing Link: Engineering delegates.

While good engineers are also good scientists, the converse is not necessarily true. Good scientists are not necessarily good engineers.

Engineers are experts at solving problems. Scientists are experts at testing hypotheses. There is a difference.

Good engineers are trained to correct for biases in the scientific data and this is especially important in dealing with the PolyCrisis since there is a serious carnist bias in the mainstream discourse on environmental science, nutrition science, health science and climate science. Many of the science delegates as well as the political delegates at COP17 made it clear to us that while they appreciated the Vegan food we were delivering to them, such food was a novelty for them. How can they possibly overcome the biases in the underlying data if they are themselves seeing the world through a carnist lens, and they are not even professionally trained to correct for such biases?

I trust that in future COPs, the UN corrects for this deficiency. Personally, I am happy to coordinate and assemble the necessary Engineering delegates from the nations of the world to implement the PolySolution to deal with our planetary emergency.

I beg the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Gutierrez, to take me up on my offer. The time to do this is now.

Join Us for V-COP27

The Emergence of Planet B will be the theme of the upcoming hybrid in-person/virtual Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #27 (V-COP27), which will be hosted in Sadhana Forest, Auroville, TN, India, from Friday, Nov 6, 2026 through Sunday, Nov 8, 2026. Please plan to join us, especially if you are already in India.

More on Planet B

You can download the PDFs of both Planet B books: “There IS a Planet B” and “A Guide to Planet B” for free at https://climatehealers.org/for-you/books.

You can read two peer-reviewed papers on Planet B here:
Planet B: A Systems Engineering Framework for World Peace and Planetary Health
Planet B: A PolySolution for the Planetary PolyCrisis Emergency

For more on Planet B, please go to https://climatehealers.org/planetb

With much love,