Yerevan biodiversity summit ends with a plan to change course, but funding stays largely unresolved

The UN biodiversity summit in the Armenian capital Yerevan has ended in agreement on its main texts. The closing session was repeatedly postponed on Friday, but overnight into Saturday representatives of nearly 200 countries adopted two key decisions without objection, La Libre and Swiss broadcaster RTS report, citing the AFP news agency. According to the BBC, the deal came early on Saturday morning, hours after the summit had been due to end. Armenian environment minister Hambardzum Matevosyan, who chaired the summit, gavelled the texts through to applause. Talks on other points were still going on after half past four.

The first text is a global midterm review of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal agreement, which is roughly to nature what the Paris Agreement is to the climate. That agreement sets 23 targets for 2030, such as protecting 30 percent of land and sea, but almost all of them are behind schedule. According to the BBC, countries now acknowledge that they are falling behind. The text calls for stepped-up efforts. The strongest call was to identify and phase out harmful subsidies faster, for example for oil extraction or bottom trawling, RFI writes. Greenpeace considers the wording weak but does see political will on that point, the organisation told AFP.

The second text concerns finance, and much was left undone there. According to the BBC, countries agreed in 2022 to put 30 billion dollars towards nature recovery by the end of the decade and to raise a further 170 billion from private sources, but those pledges are lagging because many countries are shifting aid money to defence. In Yerevan, more than a billion dollars was pledged, half of it by philanthropists. The European Union tried to get large emerging economies such as China onto the list of donor countries, a list that has not been updated since 2006. The Cali Fund, to which companies profiting from genetic material found in nature are supposed to contribute, had barely 10,000 dollars at the start of the summit. Several financial issues have been pushed to the next summit, RFI says, which Ecuador will host in 2028 after a secret ballot.

The summit was also marked by tension over the scientific reports underpinning nature policy. A small group of countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, reportedly obstructed their approval, the BBC reports. French minister Monique Barbut said it was above all those attacks on science that bothered her, according to Radio-Canada. One conservation group told AFP the agreement was neither exciting nor detailed, but still good news because there is an agreement at all.