Nearly 200 nations adopted hard-fought agreements at the United Nations biodiversity summit in Yerevan on Friday, October 30, aiming to get the world’s faltering nature goals back on track after two weeks of tense negotiations that ran into overtime.
Delegates cheered as the crucial texts were approved at the COP17 conference in Armenia’s capital, bringing down the curtain on a summit that had spent days wrestling with how to revive a landmark pledge to halt the destruction of nature by 2030.
Key Takeaways
- Nearly 200 nations adopted agreements at COP17 in Yerevan on October 30 after two weeks of tense talks that ran into overtime.
- The deal aims to speed up progress toward the 2030 targets agreed in 2022, including protecting 30 percent of land and oceans.
- Ecuador will host the next biodiversity summit in 2028, as countries face a widening gap between pledges and funding.
A deal reached in overtime
The summit, formally the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, began on October 19 and was scheduled to end on October 30. Instead, negotiations spilled into overtime on Friday, with a plenary session rescheduled for late in the evening as governments worked to bridge their differences.
As the gavel finally came down on the documents, COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, declared the texts adopted to applause from the hall. The final versions of the documents were not immediately available, according to reports from the closing session.
The outcome was far from assured. On the summit’s final scheduled day, nations were still divided over how to tackle harmful subsidies, how to better finance the protection of Earth’s land and oceans, and how to boost corporate contributions to a near-empty UN conservation fund.
The deal does not erase the gap between what countries promised in 2022 and what they have delivered since, but it keeps the 2030 targets alive and gives governments a shared plan to accelerate.
What the 2022 pact promised
The Yerevan talks were a stocktake of a historic pact adopted in Montreal in 2022, when nearly 200 nations pledged to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. That agreement, sometimes called the Paris agreement for nature, set 23 global targets for 2030, including protecting 30 percent of land and oceans, tackling pollution and invasive species, and restoring degraded ecosystems.
Countries also promised to raise $200 billion a year by 2030 for biodiversity, and to begin phasing out or reforming subsidies that could provide another $500 billion for nature. Finance for poorer countries was to rise to $20 billion annually by 2025, increasing to $30 billion each year by 2030.
Ahead of COP17, however, a UN assessment warned that the pace of action was insufficient to meet almost all of these targets. Fewer than half of the parties’ biodiversity targets are on track, and current commitments would protect only 26 percent of land and 12 percent of sea by 2030, according to a UN progress report cited before the summit.
The funding gap is stark. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed countries raising between $75 billion and $92 billion each year from 2023 to 2025 — less than half of the 2030 goal. Convention executive secretary Astrid Schomaker had warned before the summit that the world was not moving fast enough.
The sticking points in Yerevan
One of the summit’s major outcomes was the so-called global review: a set of recommendations for turning lagging pledges into action and speeding up progress to the 2030 deadline. A draft text called on countries to accelerate their efforts and stressed that increased action was needed to tackle the root drivers of nature loss.
But the review spent days in limbo as negotiators argued over its strength. One core dispute was reforming subsidies and other incentives that encourage activities harmful to nature, such as fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and overfishing — some of the toughest objectives in the 2022 pact, and among those with the least progress.
The talks in Yerevan followed earlier tensions at the summit over the science underpinning the negotiations, covered in our report on the COP17 science dispute. The United States is not a party to the biodiversity treaty.
- 30 percent of land and oceans to be protected by 2030 under the 30×30 target
- $200 billion a year promised for biodiversity by 2030
- 26 percent of land and 12 percent of sea covered by current commitments
- Ecuador to host the next biodiversity summit in 2028
Why the outcome matters beyond Yerevan
Nature loss is not an abstract concern for the countries at the table. The same week as the summit, a glacial lake outburst in Bhutan triggered flood alerts downstream, a reminder of how environmental pressures cross borders and hit communities with little warning.
Reacting to the Yerevan outcome, Catherine Weller from Fauna and Flora said the text needed to respond to the irrefutable evidence that the world is off track for its 2030 deadline, and that while it was not particularly exciting or detailed, it was good news that countries could reach agreement at all.
French Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut had played down hopes of major breakthroughs at COP17 before the final deal, underlining how low expectations had fallen after two weeks in which progress was slow and major breakthroughs scarce.
What to Watch Next
The deal keeps the 2030 targets alive, but the hard work now shifts to national action: faster protection of land and seas, reform of harmful subsidies, and closing the finance gap before the next summit. Ecuador will host the next biodiversity summit in 2028, where countries will again be judged on whether the promises made in Yerevan turned into measurable progress. Until then, the question hanging over the 2022 pact remains the same one that dominated COP17 — whether pledges made in conference halls become protection on the ground and in the oceans.