COP17: The world has a plan to save nature. Is it working?

This article is published in association with United Nations.

The UN Secretary-General has called for an end to the “war on nature”. On Monday, governments gathering in Yerevan, Armenia, will have to confront a more practical question: are they doing enough to win the peace and put the world’s biodiversity goals back on track?

COP17, the UN Biodiversity Conference, comes at a critical halfway point in the global effort to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Running from 19 to 30 October, the meeting will take stock of progress, identify where countries are falling behind and, crucially, consider how to accelerate action over the next four years.

Here’s what you need to know:

First things first: What is the global biodiversity framework?

The big picture: Think of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as the world’s blueprint for halting and reversing the destruction of nature.

Agreed in 2022, it contains 23 targets for 2030 and four longer-term goals for 2050. It tackles the main drivers of biodiversity loss, including changes in how land and seas are used, unsustainable exploitation of species, climate change, pollution and invasive species.

Its best known ambition is “30 by 30”: conserving 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030, the deadline for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

But, the framework goes much further, including financing for biodiversity, reforming harmful incentives, encouraging more sustainable production and consumption and addressing businesses’ impacts and dependencies on nature.

So, how are we doing?

Reality check: We’re not moving fast enough.

There has been movement. Nearly 90 per cent of the 196 parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity have established national biodiversity targets, close to 60 per cent have developed national biodiversity strategies and action plans and more than 70 per cent have submitted national reports.

But, fewer than half of the national targets assessed by parties are on track. Ambition also remains short of the 30-by-30 goal, while major gaps persist in finance, capacity, cooperation and the data needed to track progress.

As Secretary-General António Guterres told leaders in Yerevan on Friday: “Halfway to 2030, Yerevan is our moment of accountability.”

What’s actually on the table at COP17?

Why it matters: COP17 is essentially about moving from promises to delivery.

Among the big issues governments will grapple with:

• Taking stock: Countries will undertake the first global review of collective progress under the framework, examining what has been achieved since 2022 and where faster action is needed.
• Closing the implementation gap: The question is how to translate national targets and plans into measurable results on the ground.
• Finding the money: The framework calls for at least $200 billion annually from all sources by 2030, including at least $30 billion in international biodiversity finance, according to Armenia’s UN Ambassador Paruyr Hovhannisyan.
• Making the Cali Fund work: Governments will have an opportunity to advance practical arrangements for the fund, designed to support fair and equitable benefit-sharing from commercial use of digital sequence information on genetic resources.
• Tracking progress: Better monitoring, data, capacity and cooperation are needed so countries can measure whether commitments are actually delivering results.
• Changing the economics: Some of the areas furthest behind require action outside environment ministries, including on finance, business, sustainable consumption and harmful incentives.

Yerevan’s test

For host Armenia, success means COP17 becoming both a “review COP” and an “implementation COP”.

“We cannot treat 2030 as a distant deadline,” Ambassador Hovhannisyan told UN News. “Decisions taken in Yerevan must help close the gap between commitments and results on the ground.”

Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s Environment Minister and incoming COP17 president, puts the progression simply: COP15 produced the framework and COP16 advanced mechanisms to implement it. COP17, he said, must establish “where we stand, what is working, where progress is falling short and what must change”.

The bottom line

Biodiversity can sound abstract. Its loss is anything but.

As António Guterres reminded leaders on Friday, the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe depend on it. The question in Yerevan is whether countries can turn an ambitious global agreement into action quickly enough.

On Thursday, launching a major UN report evaluating global progress under the landmark Kunming framework, Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, distilled the challenge: “We know where we stand. We know where the gaps are. Now, we must work together to close them.”