H.E. Mr. Munkhtamir Batbayar, Vice Minister, Ministry of Environment and Climate Change of Mongolia,   

Excellencies, 

Ladies and Gentlemen 

Our futures are collapsing — not in fifty years, but now.  

A regional conflict becomes a grain shortage that drives a global price spike and a wave of export bans deepens the shortage.  

A summer drought in Mongolia, driven by the changing global climate, shrinks pasture growth and drives herders to overgraze the remaining grassland. The resulting desertification leaves thinner, weaker livestock unable to survive the next Dzud and threatening herder livelihoods. 

The countries least responsible often bear the greatest cost. Each shock makes the next harder to absorb. Competing demands by agriculture, pastoral livelihoods, ecosystem restoration, and revenue generation and development must be balanced under increasing environmental pressures.   

This is the nature of the challenge: not isolated crises but rapidly sequenced shocks with mutually amplifying impacts on our economies, societies and the natural world surrounding us, which turn into permanent state of crisis as a new normal. This not only makes every shock harder to buffer but also overwhelms the ability of our institutions to adapt.   

The solutions need to be equally interconnected - seeking to preserve the capability of decision makers to put forward fit-for-purpose solutions that can safeguard the trust in governance systems and institutional legitimacy.  

In UNDP, we work with Governments to expand their policy choices, better grasp the trade-offs, and build political capital for decisions that affect their constituents.  

In many cases what is scarce is not lack of action or even of resources, but failure to see the connection between various response actions and ensuring complementarity between sectoral policies and interventions for higher impact.   

When we sit down with governments across the region, we hear the same three challenges repeated in different words:   

1. Duplication and lack of coordination between different actors;  
2. Competing mandates pulling investment in different directions; 
3. Top-down planning that gets designed centrally and lacks stakeholder inputs.  

To address this challenge, UNDP has been exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence in different ways. 

In Indonesia, for example, with support from the Islamic Development Bank and Germany, together with the Ministry of Village, we built an AI-enabled tool called STRIVE, which lets villagers submit their own priorities directly, as text, voice recordings or photos. It uses AI to read across thousands of these inputs at once, surfacing needs that traditional consultations often miss. This augmented platform helps decision-makers see the gaps and trade-offs between village-related policies, and redirect investment for amplified impact on green and inclusive village development.  

It aligns public funding with what communities say they need to finance development at the village level.  

Elsewhere, through the GEF Early Action Program and our Climate Promise, UNDP supported over 20 governments with AI to align their national climate and biodiversity targets, reducing the time spent on desk reviews so that precious human resource can be focused on more meaningful work such as stakeholder dialogs and strategic decision making.   

As emphasized by this tri-COP year, coherence between nature, climate, and land policies is a critical opportunity. A stable climate simply cannot exist without a stable natural environment, and a sustainable future requires healthy ecosystems and land.  

Used well, AI helps decision-makers see trade-offs before they are forced to choose, rather than after.  

Yet, we must remember that AI can support policymaking, but it does not replace government expertise or political decision-making, human validation remains central. We must also stay mindful of AI’s own footprint on energy, water and critical minerals to ensure that its use does not undermine critical climate and biodiversity protection agendas.   

That is what today’s discussion is about.  

I would like to thank the Governments of Mongolia and Panama for co-organising this session with UNDP and thank you all for joining us during what is undoubtedly a very busy COP to discuss this important topic. 

I look forward to hearing from governments and partners on the role you see it playing. Thank you.