Nearly 200 countries face a final push today to agree new funding and accountability rules for nature. The COP17 biodiversity summit enters its last hours in Yerevan, Armenia, after 11 days of talks.
The conference opened on 19 October 2026. It is the first formal check on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. That framework sets 23 targets, agreed by 196 parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2022. The targets include protecting 30% of the world’s land, inland waters and seas by 2030. They also call for mobilising $200 billion a year for nature from all sources.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a progress report on 15 October, ahead of the summit. It found that fewer than half of the assessed targets are on track. CBD Executive Secretary Astrid Schomaker told delegates the meeting is about “accelerating action to protect nature,” rather than renegotiating commitments already made.
A halfway marker, not a finish line
More than 10,000 delegates registered for the meeting. They include more than 70 ministers and roughly 150 high-level officials. Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Robert Abisoghomonyan said this week that the government hopes to close the summit with consensus on the Yerevan Pathway. Delegates describe that package as a set of decisions meant to close gaps in biodiversity finance and speed up delivery of the 2022 framework.
Finance has dominated the closed-door sessions. The 2022 agreement calls for $30 billion a year in international public finance to flow to developing countries by 2030. That sits on top of the wider $200 billion target. A 2020 estimate put the global biodiversity financing gap at close to $700 billion a year. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has found that existing funding covers only 10% to 20% of what protected areas need in East and Southern Africa.
Africa’s protected areas tell a mixed story
African countries have formally protected about 19.9% of their land and 17.2% of their waters. That is slightly ahead of the global averages of 18.7% and 10%, according to tracking by Skytruth. Yet 85% of parties missed a 2024 deadline to submit national biodiversity strategies setting out how they will meet the 2030 targets.
Indigenous rights have also featured heavily in the Yerevan talks. That theme carried fresh weight this week after Botswana’s leading university awarded an honorary doctorate to Roy Sesana, the 97-year-old San rights campaigner who fought the eviction of Indigenous communities from the Central Kalahari.
Delegates have pointed to projects already under way as evidence the 2030 target is achievable with the right design. New marine protected areas off Tanzania’s Pemba Island, agreed through years of talks with local fishing communities, offer one example. A stalled reforestation effort in central Mozambique illustrates the opposite risk: the gap between declaring protection on paper and making it hold on the ground.
Civil society groups used the summit to press Armenia itself on the same point. The Global Forest Coalition called on the host government, the CBD and attending states to address contradictions in national policy. It pointed to Armenia’s approval of operations at the Amulsar gold mine despite environmental and human rights concerns. Greenpeace activists flew a hot-air balloon over the town of Garni bearing the message “Delay is Destruction.”
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, opening the summit on 18 October, urged delegates to focus on tangible results rather than declarations. Whether the COP17 biodiversity summit delivers either answer should become clear as the conference closes.
