Calls are growing for major reforms to UN biodiversity summits as countries fail to deliver on their promises to halt the destruction of the natural world, with governments likely on track to continue their record of never having met a target in the 34-year history of the convention.
Two weeks of negotiations at biodiversity Cop17 in Yerevan, Armenia, concluded on Saturday morning with countries vowing to redouble their efforts to meeting this decade’s targets, which include commitments to protect 30% of the planet for nature, restore nearly a third of Earth’s degraded ecosystems and reform $500bn (£410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies.
Agreed just four years by nearly every government on Earth, they aim to transform humanity’s relationship with nature. Despite progress in some areas, governments are way off track on meeting almost all of the targets. The UK is set to meet just three of the 23.
After talks that ran overnight from Friday into Saturday morning, countries signed off several measures, including a commitment to ramp up action on meeting existing targets and reaffirming a goal to increase biodiversity finance to $30bn a year by the end of the decade.
During the conference, environment ministers, activists and officials appealed for significant changes to the way the summits function to ensure governments follow through on with meaningful action on the drivers of biodiversity loss.
Panama’s environment minister, Juan Carlos Navarro, a veteran conservationist, said the Cop process had been “designed to fail”, arguing that decisions should be taken by a majority as the consensus-based process allows “one idiot” to prevent agreement.
“A lot of what’s going on out here at the Cop is just a bunch of baloney and beautiful speeches and BS,” he told AFP earlier this week. “We cannot have – we cannot expect – a consensus between every nation on Earth on every topic. That’s ridiculous. Cops have been designed to fail, and they are not disappointing.”
He also argued that the UN should host a single environmental Cop each year to tackle the climate, biodiversity, plastics and other issues in one go.
“This just makes my blood boil, because while we fiddle, Rome burns,” he said.
The negotiations in the Armenian capital have seen Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Russia water down language on environmental ambition in the final agreement, while wealthier governments were divided on who would contribute more financial resources.
European nations would like to see additions to the list of donor states, as China and several of the Gulf states are still classified as developing countries in the UN process despite decades of rapid economic development. The final agreement in Yerevan left this issue open.
Key decisions on a fund to mobilise resources from firms that make money from digital forms of biodiversity, such as pharmaceutical companies, were postponed to the next summit in Ecuador in two years’ time. It had been hoped that the fund would generate £1bn a year for nature conservation, with a significant share going to Indigenous communities, but it has so far raised just over $10,000.
The calls for changes to the biodiversity Cop process echo an intervention by leading policy experts during climate Cop29 in Azerbaijan in 2024 who said the summit was “no longer fit for purpose” and needed to shift to focus on implementation.
Ruth Davis, UK nature envoy, said that she recognised that the meetings could be “extremely frustratiing”, but said that a huge amount of implementation was happening around the world.
“We’ve got to make the system actually deliver outcomes for people, otherwise they’ll lose confidence in it,” she said. “In the end, this is a process that is owned by governments who are parties to it. But I know we are going to find friends and allies in making the process work for the citizens of countries for whom this is really important, not least because they are the ones facing the impacts.”
Efforts to reform the UN’s sprawling environmental agenda are already under way. Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN environment programme, said that the current systems were delivering, but they were moving too slowly.
“Right now, the environmental agenda is very cluttered. There are lots of meetings, important as each one is. Let’s begin with the easy stuff, like programmatic overlap between conventions, which has an energy-sapping effect,” said Andersen.
“We identified the illegal wildlife trade back in the 70s as a problem, then we identified migratory species, then broader biodiversity, then wetlands. Each of these conventions came along at the right time, but we now have a plethora of them. Maybe we should think about that,” she said.
