Nearly 200 countries agree to act, but still fight over who pays

Nearly 200 countries reached agreements at the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia on Saturday, urging faster action on nature goals while leaving critical financing disputes unresolved. ^[1]

Negotiations in Yerevan ran through Friday night into Saturday, October 31, beyond the summit's scheduled close. Governments had gathered for the first global review of their 2022 agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. ^[1][2][3]

They arrived with evidence that delivery was falling short. Nearly 90% of the Convention on Biological Diversity's 196 parties had set national targets, but fewer than half of the targets assessed were on track, according to the UN's pre-summit assessment. National conservation pledges also fell short of the goal to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030. ^[2]

France's Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut said the outcome was "not commensurate" with the crisis. She described the failure to make more progress as missed opportunities to accelerate the response to biodiversity loss. ^[1]

The final adopted texts were not immediately available on October 31. The precise commitments, subsidy wording, funding pledges and timetable for unfinished decisions therefore still need to be checked against those documents. Descriptions below of draft provisions remain provisional. ^[1]

A push to accelerate, with weak terms on subsidies

The summit, known as COP17, reviewed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Adopted in 2022, it contains 23 targets for 2030 and four longer-term goals for 2050, covering conservation, pollution, invasive species, finance and other pressures on nature. ^[2][3]

A draft summit text urged countries to accelerate their efforts and said increased action was needed to address the drivers of biodiversity loss. Guido Broekhoven of WWF International called the draft a positive outcome and a step forward, while pointing to weaknesses, particularly on harmful subsidies. ^[1]

That is a serious weakness. Governments can spend money protecting nature while maintaining financial incentives that damage it. The framework's Target 18 calls for action on harmful subsidies, yet the UN assessment found that many countries had not committed to reducing them. ^[2]

An Lambrechts of Greenpeace International said the summit had generated political momentum on harmful financial incentives despite weak wording in the agreed decision. That offers a possible opening for further negotiations, rather than evidence that governments have resolved the conflict in their spending priorities. ^[1]

The summit's central problem was already visible in the assessment: setting a national target is easier than meeting it. With fewer than half of assessed targets on track, another appeal for speed needs to produce changes in budgets, rules and decisions about how land and sea are used. ^[2]

Those decisions reach well beyond environment ministries. The UN says implementing the framework requires action across agriculture, fisheries, finance and business. It links biodiversity to food and water security, health, livelihoods and economic resilience. ^[2][3]

A conservation agreement loses force when the ministries controlling economic incentives do not carry it through. The weak subsidy language leaves that test ahead.

The argument over who pays

Finance exposed another division. The European Union pushed for wealthy emerging economies, including China, to contribute to global conservation efforts. A draft text invited countries outside the developed-country donor group to join voluntarily. ^[1]

That would broaden the invitation to pay without settling the dispute over who should bear the bill. A voluntary invitation gives governments room to contribute, but also room to decline.

The summit also left unresolved questions about the design of the Cali Fund, a UN mechanism intended to draw corporate contributions linked to the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources. That information records the genetic makeup of living things, allowing it to be studied and used without necessarily obtaining a physical sample. ^[1][4]

The fund is meant to turn commercial use of nature's genetic information into contributions that share the benefits. Its design matters because a funding mechanism needs workable rules before money can reliably reach its intended recipients. ^[4]

Pakhi Das of Plant-for-the-Planet said delaying essential decisions by two years would leave the fund empty until then. That is her assessment of the consequences, not an established outcome. ^[1]

Unfinished operational work predated the summit. In its October 15 newsletter, the Cali Fund said its Steering Committee had identified work still to be completed and would meet again after COP17. The negotiations thus ended with an existing implementation problem still unresolved. ^[1][4]

Decisions about conservation money also shape whose priorities prevail. The Daily Inference reported on October 25 on two University of Southern California researchers using the California condor to examine who gets a say in deciding which species are saved.

Agreement under pressure

UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker offered a more favourable assessment of the summit. She said it had achieved "quite remarkable things" at a time when multilateralism was supposedly not functioning, and said strong negotiated commitments on some difficult subjects had never been expected. ^[1]

Keeping countries negotiating has value. But the measure of success for this agreement must be whether it changes the trajectory documented by its own progress review. Diplomatic endurance cannot substitute for implementation.

Politics also intruded into the treatment of evidence. Swiss negotiator Gabriela Blatter, speaking for dozens of countries, said they regretted growing instances in which scientific evidence and its use had been challenged or constrained by politics. The countries accused of obstruction were not identified. ^[1]

The immediate test is what the adopted decisions require governments to do, particularly on subsidies and finance. The Cali Fund's Steering Committee is due to reconvene after COP17. The next biodiversity summit will be held in Ecuador in 2028, after it defeated Panama in a secret vote. By then, governments will have two years left to meet their 2030 targets. ^[1][4]