COP17: Nearly 200 Nations Agree to Get Nature Goals Back on Track in Yerevan

The Deal Agreed in Overtime

Nearly 200 nations struck hard-fought agreements on Friday, October 30, at the United Nations biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, in a late push to get the world’s nature goals back on track. Delegates cheered as the key texts were approved in overtime, after two weeks of tense negotiations at the COP17 conference. COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan of Armenia brought down the gavel on the documents, although the final versions were not immediately available in the hours that followed.

The summit sought to revive a landmark commitment to halt and reverse the destruction of nature by 2030. That commitment was made in 2022, when countries adopted a global framework with 23 targets for 2030, including protecting 30 percent of land and oceans, tackling pollution and invasive species, and increasing money for conservation. Ahead of the Yerevan talks, the United Nations warned that progress was lagging and that most of those targets were off track.

What the Agreement Tries to Fix

The Yerevan talks were, in effect, a stocktake with a deadline attached. Countries were urged to correct course to keep the 2030 pact alive and to protect the plants, animals and ecosystems that sustain life on Earth. The agreed texts included a global review, a set of recommendations intended to turn lagging pledges into faster action before the 2030 deadline. It was not immediately clear which recommendations made it into the final adopted text, and the agreed review had still not been published hours after its adoption.

That uncertainty shaped the reaction in the hall. The celebrations were tempered by bitter debates and limited progress on some of the hardest issues, and several delegations described the outcome as a step forward rather than a breakthrough. 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 missed opportunities to speed up the response to biodiversity loss.

The deal keeps the 2030 nature pact alive, but leaves its hardest questions for the next round of talks.

Where Talks Stalled: Money and Subsidies

Two issues proved the most politically fraught. The first was finance: how to widen the group of countries that contribute to biodiversity funding, and how to close the gap between what countries promised and what has actually been raised. Governments could not agree on that wider contributor base, and the final text only stated in general terms that more money would help. There was also no progress on the operating rules of the Cali Fund, agreed at the previous biodiversity conference in Colombia, which aims to collect money from companies that use digital sequence information from nature.

The second sticking point was subsidies and other incentives that encourage activities harmful to nature, such as fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and overfishing. Reforming those incentives was one of the most contested agenda items in Yerevan, and negotiators left the future design of biodiversity finance to be decided later. Those decisions will now fall to the next biodiversity conference.

• Two weeks of negotiations in Yerevan ran into overtime before the key texts were approved.
• The 2030 framework covers 23 targets, from protected land and oceans to pollution and invasive species.
• Ecuador will host the next biodiversity talks, COP18, in 2028, after defeating Panama in a secret vote.
• Funding rules and harmful-subsidy reform remain unresolved and move to the next round.

Why the 2030 Targets Matter

The stakes in Yerevan were not abstract. The 2022 framework is often described as a Paris agreement for nature, because it set a shared deadline for stopping a decline that touches food, water, health and livelihoods. Protecting land and oceans, restoring degraded ecosystems and cutting pollution are the practical steps behind that deadline. When progress falls short, as the natural world comes under growing pressure, the gap between promise and delivery becomes the story of the talks themselves.

That is why the Yerevan outcome reads in two ways at once. On one side, nearly 200 countries kept negotiating until they had texts they could adopt, and kept the 2030 framework intact as the shared reference point. On the other side, the texts adopted in overtime did not settle how the work will be paid for, or how quickly harmful incentives will be reformed. Both readings are supported by what was reported from the closing plenary, and both will shape how the agreement is judged in the months ahead.

What to Watch Next

What to watch next is what the adopted texts actually contain once the final versions are published, and how countries turn the global review into national action before 2030. The next test comes at COP18 in Ecuador in 2028, where the deferred decisions on biodiversity finance are due to be taken. Until then, the measure of the Yerevan deal will be whether the renewed push it promises shows up in protected areas, conservation funding and subsidy reform, or whether the same gaps reported in Yerevan are still there when UN member states meet again.