Delegates from nearly 200 countries approved the closing agreements of the COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan on Friday, in a plenary that ran past the scheduled end of two weeks of negotiations. COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan brought down the gavel to applause, but the final versions of the documents were not immediately available, and negotiations on some items continued into the early hours of Saturday.
The centrepiece is the first global review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the 2022 pact that set 23 targets for 2030, including protecting 30 percent of land and seas, cutting environmentally harmful subsidies by at least 500 billion dollars a year, and mobilising 200 billion dollars a year for biodiversity, including 30 billion dollars a year in international finance for developing countries. A UN report presented to the summit warned that most objectives are falling short. The review decision, called the Yerevan Pathway in conservation groups’ accounts, acknowledges insufficient progress and gives countries guidance to accelerate action, without replacing the framework or setting new enforceable quotas.
The hardest fights were over money and subsidies. Delegates disagreed over cutting supports for fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and overfishing, and over new sources of conservation finance at a time of strained public budgets. The European Union pressed wealthy emerging economies such as China to contribute; a compromise text invited countries outside the traditional donor list to join voluntarily rather than compelling contributions. Efforts to fix the Cali Fund, the mechanism for sharing profits from corporate use of genetic data, also proved difficult. Delegates chose Ecuador to host COP18 in 2028.
Because the adopted texts are unpublished, the summit’s real content is not yet knowable beyond its structure: a stocktake that concedes failure so far, guidance rather than obligations, and finance left to voluntary expansion. The next test is documentary, the publication of the final texts, and then national, whether governments revise their biodiversity plans before the next review.