UN biodiversity summit opens in Yerevan far short of promised billions

The UN's biodiversity summit opens Monday in Yerevan, Armenia, with the gap between what nearly 200 countries promised and what they have paid set to dominate two weeks of talks. In Montreal in 2022, treaty parties committed to protecting 30 percent of land and water by 2030 and to raising $200 billion a year for biodiversity by the same date. A UN progress report released Thursday found that current commitments would protect 26 percent of land and 12 percent of sea, and that fewer than half of the 23 global targets are on track.

The money is further behind than the acreage. OECD data shows countries raised between $75 billion and $92 billion a year from 2023 to 2025 — under half the 2030 goal. The pledge to redirect $500 billion in harmful subsidies away from fisheries and agriculture has gained little traction; few countries have even identified which subsidies they would cut. The one target roughly on track — $20 billion a year for poor countries by 2025 — reached $19 billion in 2024, and that flow now depends on foreign aid budgets that are being cut.

The United States is not a party to the treaty at all.

Astrid Schomaker, the convention's executive secretary, told the Associated Press: "We're not moving fast enough." The WWF's 2026 Living Planet Report puts average wildlife population decline at 73 percent between 1970 and 2022; a 2019 UN report found three-quarters of the world's land severely altered by humans and a million species threatened with extinction.

There are bright spots that do not run through state budgets. Latin American countries have committed to protecting 29 percent of their land; Oceania has promised 41 percent of its seas; the Philippines created a marine protected area banning the catch of rays and sharks; Cambodia set aside almost 100,000 acres in 2023. The Campaign for Nature, which spearheaded the 30-by-30 effort, counts over 5,000 national initiatives tied to the treaty.

The pattern in the numbers is consistent: the countries doing the protecting are frequently the ones hosting the biodiversity, and the countries that wrote the financing pledges are the ones whose treasuries have moved on. What remains, as aid declines, is the market route — tourism, compensation schemes, philanthropy — or quiet contraction. Governments signed targets they never budgeted for, and the shortfall arriving in Yerevan is the invoice.