YEREVAN, Armenia — Scorching wildfires, disastrous floods and the looming mass extinction of species weren’t enough to convince wealthy nations to unlock crucial funds needed to halt biodiversity loss at a global nature summit this week. As countries around the world race against the clock to protect what’s left of the Earth’s collapsing ecosystems, global talks aimed at speeding up nature protection efforts yielded underwhelming results. The United Nations COP17 on biodiversity ended on Saturday with a renewed promise from countries to speed up global efforts to protect nature and restore depleted ecosystems by 2030.
But behind that grand gesture, governments are still struggling to unlock the hundreds of billions needed to meet global biodiversity protection targets. A profound and unresolved disagreement over where that money should come from. After two weeks of negotiations over how to speed up efforts to protect ecosystems, nearly 200 countries secured a hard-fought agreement to "accelerate the implementation" of the global biodiversity framework "including by increased ambition in addressing the gaps, challenges and barriers related to implementation," according to a draft of the text, the final version of which was not immediately available.
Armenian Environment Minister Hambardzum Matevosyan, who presided over the summit, said negotiators had "achieved more than we could have expected." But in the end, governments could not agree on how to increase the number of countries currently contributing to biodiversity finance, instead only stating the obvious: that more funds would be better. The summit exposed a growing chasm between nations over who should be held financially responsible for funding conservation measures worldwide: historically wealthy countries whose economies have caused immense damage to the environment, or newly rich states whose economies have grown exponentially in the last three decades. Governments know they are running out of time.
At COP17, scientific experts reiterated that a million species are at risk of extinction, and the U.N. has identified an annual biodiversity financing gap of $700 billion. The world needs to “mobilize all international funding sources” to make it happen, she insisted. The talks also ran long due to disagreements over language related to the involvement of Indigenous peoples in a key decision-making body of the Convention.
Convention on Biological Diversity relies on the consensus that rich countries should pay more to protect nature because of the pressure their societies and economies exert on global ecosystems. Since its ratification in the 1990s, a group of wealthy countries including Canada, Australia, Japan, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway and some EU members have been funding efforts to implement the Convention. Now, those countries want other high-income nations to chip in more.
But during the negotiations, non-donor countries — which include China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Argentina — pushed back against any kind of income-related criteria to determine who should or shouldn’t be paying. The deadlock angered some nations set to benefit from a larger donor base. The countries “don't want to have the same obligations as developed countries on this issue [and] bring up the argument of ecological responsibilities,” said Juliette Landry, a senior research fellow at the think tank IDDRI.
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