Negotiators from nearly 200 countries reached a new global agreement on nature early Saturday in Yerevan, Armenia, after nearly two weeks of talks that ran hours past their scheduled close — but acknowledged they remain badly off pace on the funding needed to halt the decline of the natural world.
"And that's it. Perfect," said Hambardzum Matevosyan, president of the UN biodiversity talks, as delegates finalized the action plan. The meeting was a follow-up to the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework, in which the same countries committed to "halt and reverse" nature loss and protect 30% of the world's land and seas by 2030. According to the United Nations, the world is on track to meet just one of that framework's 24 targets, even as species disappear at roughly 100 times the natural background rate.
Money remains the sticking point
Countries acknowledged in this week's deal that they are falling behind, with many governments redirecting international aid toward defense spending and energy costs rather than conservation. In 2022, nations pledged $30 billion in public funding for nature by 2030, plus $170 billion more from private sources; this week's summit raised just over $1 billion in new pledges, about half of it from philanthropic sources including Leonardo DiCaprio's Re:wild. A separate fund meant to collect payments from companies that profit from genetic material found in nature — the Cali Fund — had received only $10,000 at the start of the meeting and saw little additional progress.
"While not particularly exciting or detailed, it's good news that countries could reach agreement," said Catherine Weller of the environmental charity Fauna & Flora. "We cannot just plod on to 2030 without a course correction."
Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, struck a similarly mixed note. "We are still seeing an appalling loss, threatening the collapse of ecosystems globally," he said, adding that "the better news is there are so many examples worldwide about how... to turn things around" — pointing to recent recoveries among elephants, green sea turtles and tigers.
Anna Ducros, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development who attended the talks, said governments had made some progress on cutting subsidies that harm nature, such as those supporting large-scale trawling. "Right now, we have the situation where governments are paying twice," she said, pushing to spend on nature while also subsidizing the industries damaging it.
Countries have so far put 623 million acres of degraded land under protection — an area larger than Greenland — but campaigners say that progress will stall without a sharp increase in financing well before the decade is out.
