Nearly 200 nations have adopted hard-fought agreements at a United Nations biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, in an attempt to get the world’s faltering effort to halt the destruction of nature back on course by 2030. Delegates cheered as the key texts were approved in overtime on Friday, October 30, 2026, after two weeks of tense negotiations at COP17, the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The applause, however, was tempered by disappointment. The celebrations were accompanied, in the words of several delegations and conservation groups, by regret over limited progress on some of the hardest issues, from money for conservation to subsidies that encourage harm to nature. The final versions of the adopted texts were not immediately available, even hours after the gavel fell, which means this article can report that agreements were reached and describe the framework they are meant to advance, but it cannot yet quote their final wording or list every commitment they contain. That caveat matters, and it should travel with any summary of the summit until the texts are published.
What is clear is the scale of the task the summit was meant to address. In 2022, the world adopted a landmark pact to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Ahead of COP17, the United Nations warned that countries would fail to meet that goal unless they urgently corrected course. The summit in Yerevan was the first global review of progress under that pact, and its central question was blunt: after four years, is the world actually moving fast enough, and if not, what must change in the four years that remain?
What was agreed in Yerevan, and what remains unpublished
The COP17 summit, held in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, concluded in the early hours of Saturday, October 31, after negotiations ran beyond their scheduled end. COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan of Armenia brought down the gavel on two major texts, telling delegates, in a phrase reported from the hall, that the work was done. Delegates cheered, but the mood was mixed: some left to catch flights while others stayed behind to argue technical points, and the final plenary stretched through Friday night and well into the next morning.
Reporting from the summit stresses that the agreed global review, the centrepiece of the meeting, had still not been published hours after its adoption, and it was not immediately clear which of the recommendations in earlier drafts had made it into the final text. A draft of one closely watched text had called on countries to accelerate their efforts and warned that increased action was needed to tackle the forces driving nature loss. Whether that language survived in its draft form, was strengthened, or was softened in the final negotiation cannot be confirmed until the texts themselves are released.
That uncertainty does not make the outcome meaningless. Agreement after two bruising weeks, in a negotiation where every direction was contested, is itself a signal that governments were unwilling to leave Yerevan without a shared review. But it does mean that any claim about the precise contents of the Yerevan agreements, beyond the broad direction reported by delegations and observers, would be premature. USN will update this story when the final texts are published and their contents can be checked directly.
The 2022 promise under review: the Kunming-Montreal framework
COP17 was the first global review of collective progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in December 2022. That framework sets 23 targets for 2030 and four longer-term goals for 2050, and it is the most ambitious global attempt yet to reverse the loss of plants, animals and ecosystems that sustain life on Earth. Its headline commitment, known as Target 3 and often called 30 by 30, calls for conserving at least 30 percent of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030, through effectively managed and equitably governed protected areas and other conservation measures.
The framework does not stop at protected areas. It also covers restoring degraded ecosystems, reducing pollution, tackling invasive species, reforming incentives that harm nature, and increasing finance for conservation, especially for developing countries. It sets a longer vision, restated in Yerevan, of living in harmony with nature by 2050. The breadth of the framework is both its strength and its difficulty: it asks governments to change land use, sea use, farming, fishing, energy and finance at the same time, and progress in one area can be undone by inaction in another.
The Yerevan Declaration, adopted at a leaders’ meeting on October 16, restated the aim of halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 and the vision of living in harmony with nature by 2050. It called for stronger national action and for more predictable, accessible public and private finance, including support for developing countries. The declaration was a political statement of intent ahead of the detailed negotiations, not a substitute for them, and the test of COP17 was whether the detailed review that followed would give governments clearer guidance, stronger accountability, and a faster pace of implementation.
What the UN review found: targets set, but fewer than half on track
The United Nations review presented at COP17 gave a sobering picture. The Convention on Biological Diversity said close to 90 percent of its 196 parties had set national biodiversity targets, which is a measure of participation, not of success. Fewer than half of the national targets that were assessed were on track, according to the review, and current pledges fell short of Target 3’s call to conserve at least 30 percent of land and water by 2030. National plans, the review found, did not cover the full scope of the global targets.
The review also identified gaps in finance, implementation capacity, cooperation and data. Those gaps matter because they explain why a target can be adopted on paper and still fail on the ground. A country may set a protection target but lack the funding to manage a protected area, the staff to enforce its rules, the data to know whether species are recovering, or the cooperation with neighbouring countries needed to protect a shared river, coastline or migratory route. The review’s message, in the words of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in the assessment announcement, was that nature will not thrive on good intentions alone.
Other assessments reported alongside the summit sharpened the point. Most of the framework’s objectives are falling short, including targets to protect 30 percent of land and oceans, tackle pollution and increase conservation funding. One observer quoted in summit reporting put it plainly: the review text needed to respond to irrefutable evidence that the world is off track for its 2030 deadline, and while the agreed text was not particularly exciting or detailed, it was good news that countries could reach agreement at all. That judgement captures the double character of Yerevan: a step forward in process, with the substance still to be proven in national action.
Five pressures driving nature loss, and the gaps behind them
The Convention’s assessment names five direct pressures driving biodiversity loss, alongside wider economic and financial activities that amplify them. The first is land- and sea-use change: forests cleared for farming, wetlands drained for building, grasslands ploughed, and coastal areas developed in ways that remove the habitats species depend on. The second is the unsustainable exploitation of species, through overfishing, overhunting and trade that takes more than populations can replace.
The third pressure is climate change, which shifts rainfall, raises temperatures, bleaches coral reefs and forces species to move, often faster than they can adapt. The fourth is pollution, from pesticides, fertilisers, plastics and industrial chemicals that poison soil, rivers and oceans. The fifth is invasive alien species, plants and animals introduced, often by accident, into places where they have no natural predators and outcompete native species. Together, these pressures do not act in isolation. A forest weakened by drought is more vulnerable to clearing; a reef stressed by warming is more vulnerable to pollution; a species already reduced by overfishing is less able to survive a new predator.
Behind those direct pressures sit the gaps the review identified. Finance is the most visible, but capacity, cooperation and data are just as important. Many developing countries, which hold much of the world’s remaining biodiversity, lack the monitoring systems to track species and ecosystems in detail, the technical staff to design and enforce conservation plans, and the access to finance on terms they can use. International cooperation is also uneven, because biodiversity does not respect borders, while budgets, laws and enforcement do. COP17’s review was meant to address all four gaps, not finance alone, and its success will be judged by whether national plans become fuller, better funded and better measured in the years before the next review.
The money fight: a $700 billion gap and a fund close to empty
No issue at COP17 was more contentious than money. The framework aims to mobilise 200 billion dollars a year for biodiversity by 2030, including 30 billion dollars a year in international finance for developing countries. It also calls for reducing incentives harmful to nature by at least 500 billion dollars a year by 2030. The overall biodiversity finance gap is estimated at about 700 billion dollars a year, a figure that combines the shortfall in conservation funding with the scale of harmful subsidies that still flow to activities damaging nature.
Those numbers explain why the finance negotiation was so difficult. Public budgets in many countries are under strain, amid an energy crisis and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and governments disagree about who should pay, how much, and through which channels. The European Union pressed wealthy emerging economies, including China, to contribute to international conservation finance, a proposal that other countries resisted as a change to the established division between developed and developing countries. A draft text that circulated on Friday invited countries outside the traditional donor group to join voluntarily, a compromise that, if it survived, would broaden the contributor base without formally rewriting the rules.
The Cali Fund, a United Nations mechanism created to channel corporate contributions linked to the use of genetic data from plants and other organisms toward conservation in developing countries, became a symbol of the finance problem. The fund began in early 2025 with an annual fundraising target of 1 billion dollars, but reporting during COP17 put the amount actually received at only about 10,000 dollars. Outstanding questions over the fund’s design were left unresolved in Yerevan, and one campaigner quoted in summit reporting warned that by deferring essential decisions by two years, parties had all but ensured the fund remains empty until then. That criticism should be read as an advocate’s judgement, not as a formal finding, but it reflects a wider frustration that finance decisions were postponed rather than settled.
The history of the finance dispute helps explain the caution. Negotiations over conservation finance at COP16 in Colombia in 2024 ran beyond schedule and ended without an agreement. When talks resumed in Rome in early 2025, countries reached a deal. COP17 therefore arrived with a recent precedent for both failure and recovery, and delegations were aware that another failure on finance would damage confidence in the whole framework. Whether Yerevan’s agreements, once published, contain enough on finance to break that pattern is a question that cannot be answered until the texts are available and national budgets begin to reflect them.
Subsidies, science and disappointment: why some called Yerevan a missed opportunity
Tackling subsidies and other incentives that encourage activities harmful to nature, such as fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and overfishing, was one of the most politically fraught items at the summit. Governments have made limited headway on an existing pledge to shrink public spending that supports damaging activities, because those subsidies are often tied to jobs, food prices and energy security, and reforming them creates immediate political costs for benefits that are diffuse and long-term. Observers from conservation groups said the agreed text expressed the subsidy issue in weak terms, even as they welcomed what they described as important political momentum to address harmful financial incentives, including subsidies.
A separate dispute, over science, cast a shadow over the talks. A number of countries were accused of undermining efforts to approve key scientific reports, in scenes that shocked even seasoned negotiators. The Swiss negotiator, speaking on behalf of dozens of countries, said delegations regretted the increasing instances in which scientific evidence and its uptake had been challenged or constrained by politics, while fully respecting every state’s right to safeguard its national interest. The statement’s core claim, that science itself is not negotiable, was a rebuke to the idea that scientific findings can be bargained away in the same way as funding formulas or deadlines.
That combination of weak subsidy language, unresolved finance design and contested science explains why the French ecological transition minister, Monique Barbut, said early on Saturday that the outcome was not commensurate with the crisis facing the natural world, and described progress not achieved in Yerevan as a series of missed opportunities to speed up the response to biodiversity loss. Her judgement was echoed, in softer form, by other observers who called the agreement a step forward with clear weaknesses. Both views can be true at once: an agreement that keeps the 2030 framework alive is better than a collapse, and an agreement that leaves the hardest decisions for later is not yet a turnaround.
What happens next: Ecuador 2028 and the test before the next review
The summit also settled one practical question for the future. In the early hours of Saturday, delegates decided that Ecuador would host the next biodiversity talks in 2028, after the South American nation defeated rival candidate Panama in a secret vote. That decision gives the process a host and a date, and it places the next round of negotiations in a country whose own biodiversity, from the Amazon to the Galapagos, is globally significant. The next global review is scheduled for a later conference, which means the agreements reached in Yerevan will be judged first by what governments do at home, not by what they promise at the next summit.
For governments, the immediate task is to turn the Yerevan review into stronger national plans. That means covering the full scope of the 23 targets, not only the easiest ones; setting measurable milestones for protection, restoration and pollution; reforming the most harmful subsidies, even where that is politically difficult; and improving data so that progress, or its absence, can be seen. For donors, it means showing whether international finance moves toward the 30 billion dollar annual goal for developing countries, and whether new channels such as the Cali Fund can attract real corporate contributions rather than remaining largely empty.
For conservation groups, scientists and the public, the test is simpler: are species, habitats and ecosystems actually recovering, or are they continuing to decline while negotiations continue? The Yerevan agreements, once published, will be examined for their guidance on finance, subsidies and implementation, and for whether they give countries a clearer path to accelerate action. Until those texts are available, the honest summary of COP17 is the one the summit itself produced: nearly 200 nations agreed, after two difficult weeks, to keep the 2030 nature goals alive and to push for faster progress, while leaving the hardest questions, and the proof of change, for the years ahead.
Competing crises will shape whether that proof arrives. Conservation budgets do not exist in isolation, and wars, energy shocks and security demands all compete for the same public money and political attention. USN has separately reported on Washington’s warnings to allies over possible new Iran strikes and on the CENTCOM chief’s briefing to President Trump on Iran military options, reminders that security crises can quickly reshape spending priorities in ways that affect every other global agenda, including nature. The challenge for the biodiversity process is to show that protecting nature is not a luxury to be postponed when other crises arise, but a foundation for food, water, health and economic security that those crises make more urgent, not less.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from EconoTimes, GMA News and Free Malaysia Today.