Researchers and other observers have questioned whether the agreements reached at the COP17 biodiversity conference in Yerevan, Armenia, will be enough to significantly slow the global loss of species. Governments reaffirmed their goal of strengthening biodiversity protection, but many details about implementation and funding remained unresolved.
The two-week meeting focused on the first assessment of the global nature agreement adopted in Montreal four years ago. The accord sets 23 targets for 2030 and four broader goals for 2050. Among them are placing at least 30 percent of land and marine areas under protection, restoring 30 percent of degraded ecosystems and mobilizing 200 billion US dollars annually for biodiversity conservation by 2030.
Delegates concluded that progress so far is insufficient and that the world is falling behind on almost all of the targets. The newly adopted “Yerevan Pathway” is intended to accelerate action, including by speeding up the removal of environmentally harmful subsidies and increasing financial support in the coming years. Governments, foundations and investors announced around 1.8 billion US dollars for conservation at the conference.
Christoph Scherber of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change told the Science Media Center that the agreements lacked sufficiently strong and specific measures. He pointed to the absence of a clear timetable for reducing subsidies that harm biodiversity, including support for agriculture and fossil fuels. Although the states agreed on a goal of eliminating 500 billion US dollars in such subsidies, the commitment has no concrete schedule. Scherber also described the 1.8 billion US dollars pledged at the conference as inadequate and noted that the commitments are not binding.
Another unresolved issue concerns the fair distribution of profits from genetic resources. This could apply, for example, when pharmaceutical companies use plants native to a particular country to develop medicines. The states agreed to continue developing a precise mechanism through a working group, after it had remained uncertain during the negotiations whether they would reach even that agreement.
Because biodiversity conferences operate under a consensus rule, individual countries can prevent stronger decisions. During the Yerevan talks, Russia opposed referring to the UN agreement on protecting the high seas, which entered into force this year. Catharina Caspari of the University of Greifswald’s Institute of Energy, Environmental and Maritime Law told the Science Media Center that such a reference would have sent a strong signal under international law. Small island states including Vanuatu and Tuvalu repeatedly emphasized the agreement’s existential importance for protecting the open ocean.
Russia and Saudi Arabia also opposed references to opinions from the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. The United States remains the only country apart from the Vatican that is not a member of the biodiversity agreement.
A UN report published before COP17 concluded that the world is fully on track for none of the 23 biodiversity targets. The national objectives adopted so far are collectively insufficient to meet the global ambitions, with progress hindered not only by a lack of money but also by shortcomings in technology transfer, political coordination and data.
Assessments by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services regularly estimate that around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Species are disappearing faster than at any other time in human history, weakening nature’s contributions to people, including the provision of clean air, water and food. The assessments also stress that it is still possible to halt the decline.
Germany’s Federal Environment Ministry said that the international community must significantly accelerate its efforts to get back on track by 2030. Delegates expressed support for holding the next biodiversity conference in Quito, Ecuador, in 2028.
Sources: Süddeutsche Zeitung.