Nature Talks Reach a Deal, but Funding Falls Short

In the early hours of Saturday morning in Yerevan, Armenia, negotiators from nearly 200 countries finally reached an agreement on a new action plan for nature. The deal, concluded hours after the scheduled end of the biodiversity summit, was met with a mixture of relief and frustration. Four years ago, the same parties had signed the Global Biodiversity Framework, a landmark pact with 24 targets including protecting 30% of the world's land and seas by 2030. Yet as they gathered again, the United Nations reported that the world is on track to achieve just one of those two dozen goals.

The central tension at the talks was money. In 2022, countries pledged to direct $30 billion annually towards nature recovery by the end of the decade, with a further $170 billion to be mobilised from private sources. However, many governments have since redirected international aid to defence budgets and to cope with repeated energy shocks. At this meeting, just over $1 billion was pledged, half of it from philanthropists. A dedicated fund for companies that profit from genetic material found in nature, such as pharmaceutical firms, has raised a paltry $10,000 against an estimated potential of $3.6 billion per year. The voluntary nature of such contributions makes it difficult to compel payment, a point acknowledged even by those who advocate for the fund.

Beyond funding, the very structure of the negotiations came under fire. Panama's environment minister, Juan Carlos Navarro, argued that the consensus-based process allows a single country to block progress, calling it designed to fail. He suggested that decisions should be taken by majority vote and that the UN should hold one environmental summit per year to address climate, biodiversity, and other issues together. His frustration was echoed by others who noted that a small group of countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, had obstructed the approval of scientific reports. The French ecological transition minister expressed dismay at what she saw as attacks on science.

Yet there are glimmers of hope. Countries have placed 252 million hectares of degraded land under protection, an area larger than Greenland. Conservation efforts have led to the recovery of species such as elephants, green sea turtles, and tigers. Some progress was made on reducing harmful subsidies, though governments still pay twice: once to damage nature and again to repair it. The final agreement left key decisions unresolved, including the expansion of donor countries and the operational details of the genetic material fund, postponing them to the next summit in Ecuador in two years.

The debate over reform is not new. During the climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, leading policy experts declared the process no longer fit for purpose. The executive director of the UN environment programme acknowledged that the environmental agenda is cluttered, with overlapping conventions that sap energy. She suggested starting with easy steps like reducing programmatic overlap. But as one British envoy noted, the process is owned by governments, and they must make it deliver outcomes or risk losing public confidence.

The Deeper Challenge

Underlying these procedural and financial disputes is a fundamental question: can international agreements, negotiated by sovereign states with divergent interests, ever halt biodiversity loss? Critics argue that the track record is dismal. In the 34-year history of the biodiversity convention, no target has ever been met. The consensus model, designed to ensure broad participation, often results in lowest-common-denominator commitments. Moreover, the drivers of nature loss, agricultural expansion, overfishing, pollution, and climate change, are deeply embedded in economic systems that governments are reluctant to disrupt.

Supporters of the process counter that these summits provide a crucial platform for raising awareness, sharing knowledge, and building norms. They point to the Paris Agreement on climate change as a model: though its targets are non-binding, it has spurred national action and investment. Similarly, the biodiversity framework has catalysed some domestic policies and private sector engagement. The challenge, they say, is not the existence of the agreements but their implementation, which requires political will and adequate resources.

As the world heads towards the 2030 deadline, the gap between ambition and action remains stark. The Yerevan deal is a course correction, but whether it will be enough is uncertain. The next two years will be critical, as countries prepare for the summit in Ecuador and the annual climate conference. The question is not whether nature is worth saving, the scientific consensus is overwhelming, but whether the international community can muster the collective resolve to do so.