The world is set to miss its 2030 conservation goals as finance and action have fallen short, leaders recognized at a UN biodiversity summit in Armenia’s capital, where they agreed to step up efforts after a final overnight session.
Representatives from almost 200 countries gathered in Yerevan over the past two weeks to review progress on a landmark agreement set four years ago to protect about a third of the world’s land and seas by 2030.
The COP17 talks on biodiversity concluded on Saturday with a recognition that conservation efforts were so far too slow to realistically achieve the goals of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
A plan was agreed to accelerate progress ahead of the next summit in Ecuador in two years, dubbed the Yerevan Pathway. It would mean redoubling efforts to tackle subsidies and incentives that are harmful to nature, increasing financial, scientific, and technical support for developing countries, and strengthening monitoring and reporting mechanisms.
Steven Guilbeault, former Canadian minister of environment and climate change, said that finance remained one of the biggest obstacles to achieving global biodiversity goals.
The fact that a fund agreed at the last meeting—for companies profiting from genetic materials to voluntarily contribute to—stood largely empty was “especially disappointing.”
“We need to mobilize substantially more public and private finance, reform subsidies that harm nature, and ensure that funding reaches the countries and communities on the front lines of the nature crisis,” he said.
Catherine Weller, global policy director at the campaign group Fauna & Flora, said the Yerevan agreement was welcome but also noted that funding fell far short of a pledge that had been a key part of the 2022 deal. “In a world of trillionaires, we can certainly afford to spend $200 billion a year on protecting and restoring the very thing keeping us all alive: nature,” she said.
Conference organizers said governments, philanthropists, and businesses had announced close to $2 billion in new financial commitments to coincide with the Armenian gathering.
This included a commitment by the Netherlands to contribute $500 million to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a Brazilian initiative to pay countries to keep their forests standing. The pledge was announced in the Dutch parliament the day after Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected as president, to the relief of many attending the biodiversity summit.
After the close of the conference, Carina Pimenta, Brazil’s national secretary for bioeconomy, highlighted Lula’s record of protecting the Amazon rainforest and spoke of hope. “At a time of growing global uncertainty, the Yerevan Declaration sends a powerful message: world leaders recognise that protecting biodiversity is essential to food security, livelihoods, and economic resilience,” she said.
A growing number of countries to have drawn up national diversity plans, and the new pledge to the Brazilian fund, were “reasons for cautious optimism,” said Brian O’Donnell, director at Campaign for Nature.
But international funding for protected and conserved areas has fallen in a number of countries over years of disruption from war and high energy prices, with a 27 percent decline in environmental funding for the 2026-30 period.
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