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UN biodiversity summits face growing demands for major reforms as nations continuously fail to meet targets to halt the destruction of the natural world, with governments on track to maintain a history of missing every goal in the 34-year existence of the convention.
Cop17 Concludes in Armenia
Two weeks of negotiations at the biodiversity Cop17 summit in Yerevan, Armenia, ended on Saturday morning as countries committed to redoubling efforts for this decade’s targets. These goals include protecting 30% of the planet for nature, restoring nearly a third of degraded ecosystems, and reforming $500bn in environmentally damaging subsidies.
Agreed four years ago by nearly all governments worldwide, the targets aim to transform humanity’s relationship with nature. Despite some progress, governments remain far off track on nearly all objectives, with the UK on track to meet only three out of 23 targets.
Following overnight talks running from Friday into Saturday, countries signed measures to accelerate action on existing targets and reaffirmed a goal to increase biodiversity finance to $30bn annually by the end of the decade.
Calls for Structural Reform
Throughout the conference, environment ministers, officials, and activists demanded significant structural changes to how the summits operate to ensure governments implement meaningful actions against biodiversity loss.
Panama’s environment minister, Juan Carlos Navarro, stated that the Cop process was designed to fail and suggested that decisions should rely on majority voting because the consensus model allows a single opposing voice to stall progress. Speaking to AFP, he described much of the conference as empty speeches, arguing that expecting consensus among every nation on Earth on every topic is ridiculous.
Navarro also proposed that the UN should host a single annual environmental summit to address climate, biodiversity, plastics, and related issues simultaneously.
During the negotiations in Yerevan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Russia weakened language concerning environmental ambition within the final agreement, while wealthier nations remained divided over financial contributions.
European countries pressed for expanded donor lists, pointing out that China and several Gulf states remain classified as developing countries despite decades of economic growth, though the final agreement left this matter unresolved.
Additionally, critical decisions regarding a fund to gather resources from companies profiting from digital biodiversity, such as pharmaceutical firms, were delayed until the next summit in Ecuador in two years. Organizers had hoped the fund would produce £1bn annually for nature conservation, with substantial portions directed to Indigenous communities, but it has only raised slightly over $10,000 so far.
Broader Criticisms and Next Steps
Demands to alter the biodiversity summit mirror previous interventions by policy experts at the 2024 climate Cop29 in Azerbaijan, who argued that summits were no longer fit for purpose and required a shift toward implementation.
Ruth Davis, the UK’s nature envoy, acknowledged the extreme frustration of the meetings while emphasizing that extensive implementation is occurring globally. She stated that the system must deliver outcomes for people to maintain public confidence, noting that the process belongs to the governments involved and that allies will work to ensure it serves citizens directly impacted by environmental crises.
Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN environment programme, noted that current systems are driving change too slowly and pointed out that the broader environmental agenda is cluttered with overlapping meetings and conventions established over decades. She suggested that addressing programmatic overlaps could help alleviate energy-sapping effects across multiple environmental frameworks.
Delegates will reconvene at the next biodiversity summit in Ecuador in two years’ time.
