Cop17 at a glance: everything you need to know about the UN’s nature summit

This month’s biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, aims to push governments to meet the 23 targets agreed at Cop15 in 2022

Can countries deliver on a deal to save the world’s plants and animals?

This month, nearly every country on Earth will return to the question of how to stem the rapid destruction of the natural world. Humans are driving it, but so far we have not found a way to stop it.

In late 2022, governments reached an ambitious once-in-a-decade deal to better protect nature amid scientific warnings that the planet is going through the largest loss of life since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now, they are assessing their progress on the targets for the first time.

Every two years, signatories to the UN convention on biological diversity (CBD) hold a summit. The convention is one of three created at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 alongside climate change and desertification (the latter’s Cop17 having been held in Mongolia in August).

The diversity Cop covers three main areas: conservation of the natural world, its sustainable use, and how to share the benefits of its genetic resources. This year will be the 17th time that signatories have formally met, where the main focus is assessing progress on this decade’s targets such as protecting 30% of land and sea for nature, reforming $500bn (£375bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies, and restoring 30% of the planet’s degraded ecosystems.

Governments have never met a single UN target on nature since the

biodiversity convention was created in Rio in 1992, and there has been a big push to make sure that the next years until the 2030 deadline are different.

Armenia is the host for Cop17, which will take place in the capital, Yerevan, between 19 and 30 October. They are tasked with corralling governments to take action on their weak progress towards the targets.

Ahead of the summit, countries met in Nairobi to discuss their priorities for the summit, concluding that they are off track on every single one of the 23 targets they agreed in Montreal in 2022. In Armenia, environment ministers must decide what they are going to do about it.

But it will be a challenge: the last biodiversity summit, Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, ended in disarray with no clear agreement on key topics after negotiations ran out of time. Another round of talks were needed in Rome to finish the meeting.

Not quite. It may seem like history is repeating itself, but there are signs of progress on some targets. The aim of protecting 30% of Earth for nature is the headline target this decade, inspired by the Harvard biologist EO Wilson’s vision of protecting half of the planet for the long-term survival of humanity.

According to one estimate, governments are close to reaching this number for land, so far agreeing to place 27.5% of terrestrial areas under protection as nature reserves, national parks and other areas. But the target is not about simply creating new protected areas on paper: it emphasises effective conservation management of areas that are particularly crucial for the healthy functioning of ecosystems, such as wetlands, rainforests, grasslands and coral reefs.

Other targets have seen almost no progress. An aim to reform and repurpose $500bn of environmentally damaging subsidies has received almost no action from governments. From tax benefits given to fossil fuel companies to state support for destroying rainforests in order to expand agricultural frontiers, governments remain a major driver of biodiversity loss.

In terms of the latter, in a word: money.

Governments need to do more – and fast – if they want to meet some of this decade’s targets.

“This is a really important opportunity for parties to do a serious course correction,” said Guido Broekhoven, head of multilateral policy at the World Wide Fund for Nature, adding that countries need to commit to concrete actions to get the world back on track.

But the world has changed a lot since the deal was reached in 2022, when there was enthusiastic support for action to better protect nature after the Covid-19 pandemic.

While the US is not a signatory to the UN convention on biological diversity, it was a major funder of conservation through USAID, which has been dramatically cut by the Trump administration. Britain and other European countries have also curtailed their funding for conservation around the world.

Developing countries have long been clear that there cannot be more ambition on conservation without extra resources. Without funding – not just agreed, but delivered – it is unlikely there will be more progress on achieving this decade’s targets.

Some countries – such as Norway and Sweden – have paid up, but others are slower to do so, research has shown. “Japan stands out as a very large economy that is not putting much in terms of international nature finance forward,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature.

Private finance for biodiversity has also been falling since 2022. In 2025, the Cali Fund was launched to encourage private companies that benefit from nature’s genetic resources to contribute to conservation. It remains virtually empty. As on Monday, at the start of Cop17, it has received just $10,656 in commitments, of which $7,085 has been deposited – far short of a target to raise $1bn annually.

Another challenge is the sheer volume of issues negotiators will need to thrash out. “It’s a very busy agenda,” said Catherine Weller, Fauna & Flora’s director for global policy. “There’s a genuine risk that they might not get through it all.”

Additional reporting by Rebecca Ratcliffe