Cop17 biodiversity summit to confront funding gap for wildlife conservation

Cop17 runs in the Armenian capital Yerevan until 30 October. At its core is the first global review of progress since the adoption of a landmark nature pact in 2022.

That agreement set 23 targets, from cutting pollution to saving threatened species and conserving 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans.

Countries are off-track on 22 of them, a draft UN review found.

“Do I think we’re moving in the right direction? Yes, but way too slowly,” said Astrid Schomaker, who heads the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

“I think it’s too early to say whether any of the targets will be reached or not reached. But I think we can clearly say they’re all still reachable – but only with significant changes being made.”

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Barriers to action

Drawing on national reports and other evidence, the review examines where countries have made progress – and what is holding them back where they have not. 

Barriers differ between countries, Juliette Landry, a biodiversity researcher at the Paris-based think tank IDDRI, told RFI.

“This is a combination of a lack of political will for some countries,” she said. “But for some others, there is also lack of access to financial resources, lack of capacities, lack of technologies.”

Progress has been stronger on traditional conservation work than on changing the way goods are produced and consumed, one of the root causes of nature loss.

Environment ministries are often left to tackle damage caused by activities in other parts of the economy, creating what Landry described as a “kind of responsibility dilemma”.

Those ministries need more funding both to protect nature and to work with other ministries on changing those activities.

But budgets are being cut in rich and poor countries alike, she said, creating “a major barrier” to delivering on the pact.

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Nature in decline

The talks come as wildlife populations continue to shrink. Across nearly 6,000 species, monitored populations fell by an average of 73 percent between 1970 and 2022, the conservation group WWF found in its Living Planet Report this month.

Freshwater populations showed the steepest average decline, at 85 percent, while South America saw the sharpest regional fall, at 95 percent.

“Monitored global populations continue to decline on average, with no evidence yet of that global recovery,” said Andrew Terry, chief conservation officer at the Zoological Society of London, which manages the report with the WWF. Flamingos are among the wildlife covered by global pledges to protect biodiversity, as countries gather in Armenia to review progress towards their 2030 goals.

Targeted conservation has nevertheless helped the populations of some species recover, including tigers, Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna, southern African elephants and green sea turtles, the report said.

Zones earmarked for oil and gas overlap more than 61 million hectares of protected tropical ecosystems – an area nearly the size of France – research by the NGO Earth Insight found. Mining concessions, or areas set aside for mining, overlap another 42.7 million hectares of protected areas.

However, simply adding up protected hectares is not enough, the NGO warned. Even if countries reach the 30 percent target, those areas could remain vulnerable to industrial development.

“A majority of those concessions haven’t been licensed yet – certainly plenty are, but that means there’s an opportunity for countries to remove those concessions,” said Tyson Miller, Earth Insight’s executive director.

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Funding the damage

The cost of conservation remains a primary obstacle. Under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal pact, countries pledged to raise $200 billion a year by 2030 from public and private sources – including $30 billion in annual international funding for developing countries.

However, they are lagging in this respect, and the wealthy nations under pressure to fill the gap are facing budget squeezes in other areas. 

Wars, debt and economic pressures are demanding attention and straining budgets, Schomaker said despite nature being seen as “one of those issues that does not respect political borders”.

Corporate contributions have also fallen short. The UN’s Cali Fund, launched in February 2025 with a goal of raising $1 billion a year, has reportedly only collected $6,000.

This fund seeks voluntary contributions from companies that use genetic information from nature, such as drugmakers, to support conservation in developing countries.

Meanwhile UN figures show that governments are spending $2.6 trillion a year on environmentally harmful subsidies. For every dollar invested in protecting or restoring ecosystems, about $30 goes into activities that damage them.

Governments pledged in the 2022 pact to cut subsidies and other incentives that encourage environmental damage by $500 billion a year by 2030, but have made little progress.

Many countries want to reform or scrap those payments, Landry said. “This is money that is actually affecting nature, and this is money that is out there right now.”

But even identifying which payments to change is proving difficult, she added, because countries “can’t even agree on what is counted” as a harmful subsidy.

In its negotiating position adopted last week, the EU urged countries to maintain the ambition of the 2022 agreement and back it with faster action and more public and private funding.

The United States is not a party to the biodiversity convention and does not participate in the talks. A sperm whale calf swims beside its mother off Guam in June 2001. Protecting marine habitats is part of the global pledge to conserve 30 percent of land and oceans by 2030.

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Community participation

For indigenous peoples and local communities, the summit in Armenia will also determine how much say they have in decisions about protecting the ecosystems they help safeguard.

Governments must agree how a permanent body created for them in 2024 will work, including their participation and decision-making rights, the International Institute for Sustainable Development said in its summit briefing.

A deal in Yerevan could set priorities for the next four years. Once delegates return home, civil society groups are poised to use those commitments to challenge governments over what they are doing to fulfil them.

“We have those political signals that were agreed upon by all those parties, all those countries, but we need some accountability,” Landry said, describing the challenge those groups could put to governments.

“So are you going to be following up on that nationally? What are you going to do to accelerate those actions?”