Next week, leaders and representatives from nearly 200 countries will gather in Yerevan, Armenia, for the United Nations biodiversity summit known as COP17.
It is the first time countries will formally take stock of their progress toward the global actions to protect biodiversity that they agreed to in 2022 — and the stakes are high. From the savannas of Brazil to the Pacific’s coral reefs, wildlife is under severe threat. One million species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction — and humanity is largely to blame.
Conservation International’s experts have consulted governments in the leadup to the summit and will be in Yerevan pushing for faster action for nature.
Here are three critical questions ahead of the summit:
Is the world on track to meet its goals?
In 2022, nearly every country on Earth signed on to the most ambitious plan ever to reverse nature loss — a sweeping framework made up of 23 targets and an unprecedented goal: conserving 30 percent of all lands and seas by 2030.
This summit is the first formal check-in on that promise. Over the past two years, countries have drafted national biodiversity plans and filed national reports on their progress. All of that information has now been compiled into a single global report that will frame the negotiations in Yerevan.
“These global goals are set, but what does that actually mean for each country?” said Carly Siege, a policy expert at Conservation International. “Everyone is headed to the same place, but they’re starting from very different points. A national plan is each country’s route, and the report is how we see how far along it is.”
There is real progress to celebrate. Never before has the UN biodiversity convention had standardized reporting that makes this kind of global assessment possible. And never before have so many countries put forward detailed plans for meeting a global framework.
“So many countries submitting plans is a first,” Siege said. “That is really something to celebrate.”
But the global report delivers a sobering verdict: the world will miss every single one of the 23 targets by 2030 unless countries change course.
According to Siege, the world faces a double gap. First, even when all of the national plans are added together, their combined ambition falls short of the global targets. Second, what countries have done so far — and what they have concrete plans to do — falls short of what they’ve promised.
How to close those gaps divides countries. Many developing nations want the funding they need to deliver on the commitments they’ve already made, while many wealthier nations are pushing for new, more ambitious commitments.
“We agree with both sides,” Siege said. “Those gaps need to be identified, stated clearly, and action to address them needs to be accelerated.”
How can we protect biodiversity and solve climate change at the same time?
There is clear scientific evidence that biodiversity loss and climate change are interconnected, and nature is important to addressing both crises. Earth’s biodiversity — from tiny organisms in the soil to animals that disperse seeds — gives nature its ability to effectively store carbon and slow climate change. When it’s lost or degraded, nature can’t store as much carbon or provide other benefits that people depend on, like fresh water, food or housing materials.
“Climate and biodiversity plans shouldn’t be written in isolation,” Siege said. “The UN climate convention has its own COP, and countries are setting goals there too. It would be a missed opportunity not to make sure the two sets line up. Otherwise, a well-meaning climate measure can end up undercutting a biodiversity goal, and the reverse.”
According to Siege, this can be addressed by having countries agree to tackle the biodiversity and climate crises in tandem — in other words, ensuring international processes support better alignment between biodiversity and climate action.
Can the world afford to pay for all of this?
Protecting nature is chronically underfunded: every year, the world falls about US$ 700 billion short of what it needs to spend on biodiversity. Governments spend roughly US$ 210 billion a year in public funding to protect nature. But some of the biggest money in play is working against it.
Every year, governments spend vast sums on subsidies that end up harming nature — most of it unintentionally. Subsidies meant to keep food affordable and support livelihoods can end up funding an overapplication of fertilizer that pollutes rivers and soil, or propping up cattle ranching that drives deforestation. Then governments and taxpayers pay again to clean up the damage. A new report from Conservation International launching during the summit will put a price tag on that cycle, and subsidy reform is set to be one of the biggest conversations in Yerevan.
Part of the answer is to stop paying for the damage. These subsidies often fail on their own terms: they aren’t raising crop yields as promised, and most of the money goes to the largest landholders rather than small farmers. Reforming and redirecting them — with support to help farmers and fishers make the transition — could cover as much as half of the nature funding shortfall. That doesn’t replace the need for new funding, especially for developing countries, but it means that funding can actually take root.
Countries have already committed to act. Under Target 18 of the Global Biodiversity Framework, they pledged to cut harmful subsidies by at least US$ 500 billion a year by 2030.
Spending smarter also means ending duplication. When countries develop their climate and biodiversity plans in isolation, the result is “duplicated effort, wasted public resources and conflicting signals to businesses and investors,” said Patricia Zurita, Conservation International’s Executive Director. Those plans must reinforce each other, she said, and they must be well funded.
It also means getting more funding to the people who protect nature best.
“None of this can be accomplished without Indigenous Peoples and local communities,” Zurita said. Governments can start now, she added, by supporting Indigenous leadership in global and national decision-making and rewarding economies built on standing forests and thriving coasts.
Read about Conservation International’s recommendations for COP17
