World Nature Conference in Yerevan: Some results, but there is a lack of money and speed

The UN Nature Conservation Summit has come to a conclusion and does not need to go into a second round. At a Saturday night meeting in Yerevan, Armenia, the member states of the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed on a final document. However, important questions, such as how the funds that states and companies in the global north provide for nature conservation in the global south are managed and paid out, or how the 23 goals that the member states have set themselves should be implemented, remain open.

The summit took place against a “difficult global backdrop,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental organization Campaign for Nature, but there was reason for cautious optimism. “The growing number of national biodiversity plans shows that the ambition towards the 30x30 goal (i.e. protecting 30 percent of the area by 2030) remains unbroken.” But progress is still far too slow. “New research shows that international funding for protected areas has fallen for the second year in a row, from more than $1.2 billion in 2023 to $1 billion in 2025,” criticized O'Donnell.

“The pace and scale of measures are far from sufficient to address the biodiversity crisis,” said An Lambrechts, biodiversity policy expert at Greenpeace International. While the political promises made in Yerevan demonstrated good intentions, they do not address key obstacles to successful implementation. “These include inadequate financing, fiscal constraints and debt burdens, the almost empty coffers of the 'Cali Fund' and the urgent reform of harmful subsidies,” said Lambrechts.

“The World Nature Conference in Yerevan provided an honest inventory,” says Federal Environment Minister Carsten Schneider (SPD). “We Europeans united and negotiated strongly for nature, but there were also brakes who wanted to take less responsibility, including in financial issues,” said the minister. The UN High Seas Protection Agreement will create major new opportunities for more nature conservation in the most valuable areas of our oceans in the coming years.

However, the global community was unable to agree on concrete results for the protection of the Antarctic ocean elsewhere. After two weeks of intensive negotiations, the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) ended on Saturday in Hobart, Tasmania. Neither of the proposed marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean have been approved, nor have any new precautionary measures to save the endangered krill.

“As climate change accelerates and fishing pressure becomes increasingly concentrated in specific areas, the Southern Ocean ecosystem is becoming increasingly vulnerable after another year of inaction,” commented the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, a network of non-governmental organizations working to protect Antarctica.

The member states of the Convention on Biological Diversity were able to reach a tangible and verifiable result in Yerevan: the next nature conservation conference in two years will take place in Quito, Ecuador. In Armenia itself, the summit of the global nature conservation movement leaves an ambivalent picture. The political scientist Eric Hacopian criticized the Armenian government in the independent online medium CivilNet: They had not used the opportunity to bring the country's real problems onto the international agenda.

Parts of the southern province of Syunik are said to have been occupied by Azerbaijan since 2023. The Azerbaijani military distributed mines in a nature reserve there, which repeatedly cause bears and other animals to die. The government has also avoided political problems: Azerbaijan has still been holding Armenian hostages since the second Nagorno-Karabakh war.

However, the summit was able to draw attention to Armenian nature. Protests by Armenian environmental activists, especially against the Amulsar gold mine, were included in the reporting. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan opened it just a few days before the conference. Environmental activist Anna Shahnazaryan from the NGO “Armenian Environmental Front” also criticizes the role of the Armenian government during COP17. The government shirked its responsibility and did not talk about critical issues such as mining and the gold mine.

Shahnazaryan said Armenia only played the role of an event organizer, but was not actually a participant in the conference. Participants, for example from the European negotiating delegation, praised the negotiating skills of the Armenian presidency.