COP17 Accelerates Nature Targets—but Leaves the Money Missing
Governments left Yerevan on Saturday with a new promise to accelerate the rescue of the natural world—and without the money required to keep it.
After negotiations ran through the night, the UN biodiversity summit adopted the “Yerevan Pathway”, a political response to the first global review of the landmark Kunming-Montreal biodiversity framework. The review reached an unambiguous verdict: with only four years remaining, the world is off track to meet all 23 targets set for 2030.
The pathway calls on governments to confront subsidies that reward environmental destruction, increase support for developing countries, align national budgets with biodiversity targets and strengthen monitoring. Those priorities matter. But the summit’s most consequential decision was also its clearest warning: governments still have not built the financial system capable of carrying out the plan they already signed.
A plan running out of time
The 2022 Montreal framework promised to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and water and restore 30 percent of degraded ecosystems by 2030. It also called for mobilizing at least $200 billion a year for biodiversity and reducing harmful incentives by at least $500 billion annually.
COP17 measured the distance between those promises and reality. Nearly 90 percent of parties have now submitted national targets, according to Reuters, but fewer than half of the assessed national plans remain on track. The conference announced nearly $2 billion in new biodiversity funding. That is useful money, yet it amounts to roughly one percent of the framework’s annual finance target.
Developing countries entered the summit demanding predictable support and a permanent mechanism that would not leave conservation hostage to donor politics. Wealthy countries resisted creating obligations that would guarantee the scale of transfers required. Negotiators agreed on criteria for a permanent financing mechanism and discussed widening the contributor base, but they postponed the decisive institutional choice.
That compromise kept the summit alive. It did not close the funding gap.
The Yerevan text also elevates reform of nature-harming subsidies, a vast pool of public money that still favors destructive agriculture, fossil fuels and resource extraction. Yet the final agreement avoided binding sector-by-sector action. Governments can applaud the principle while leaving the machinery of destruction intact.
A pathway without a treasury
This contradiction runs through international environmental diplomacy. Governments adopt ambitious targets, then treat the financial means as a secondary negotiation. Developing states carry much of the world’s remaining biodiversity, but many also face debt burdens, commodity dependence and limited fiscal space. Asking them to protect ecosystems without changing those conditions transfers responsibility downward while wealth continues flowing upward.
“We cannot protect nature while continuing to finance its destruction,” CBD Executive Secretary Astrid Schomaker said.
That sentence should become the test of the Yerevan Pathway. If governments merely add conservation projects while banks, trade rules and public subsidies reward extraction, they will manage decline rather than reverse it. If they redirect those financial flows, fund Indigenous and local stewardship, and give poorer countries reliable access to resources and technology, the 2030 targets may still retain meaning.
COP17 did produce gains. Parties adopted almost 50 decisions, including new rules for a permanent body on Indigenous peoples and local communities. They also strengthened work on forests, protected areas, marine biodiversity, invasive species and monitoring. The summit showed that multilateral negotiation can still reach agreement amid geopolitical fracture.
But agreement cannot substitute for delivery. The next biodiversity conference will meet in Quito in 2028, leaving only two years before the targets expire. By then, governments will need to show not another pathway, but changed budgets, abolished destructive incentives, functioning finance and measurable ecological recovery.
Yerevan bought the process time. Nature will judge whether governments used it.
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