Nearly 200 Countries Reach Nature Deal in Yerevan, but Money Remains the Big Gap

After nearly two weeks of talks in Armenia's capital, Yerevan, delegates from nearly 200 countries have agreed the key parts of a new action plan on nature. The deal was reached early on Saturday morning, hours after the talks were due to finish.

Announcing the agreement, the meeting president, Hambardzum Matevosyan, said: 'And that's it. Perfect.' The talks had been marked by sharp disagreements and arguments between delegates, according to the reporting.

Four years earlier, in 2022, the same countries signed a landmark deal committing to halt and reverse the decline of nature. That Global Biodiversity Framework contained 24 targets, including putting 30 percent of the world's land and seas into protection by the end of the decade.

Scientists say the world is currently in a sixth mass extinction event, with species becoming extinct at 100 times the natural rate because of human activities. But according to the UN this week, the world is on track to achieve just one of those two dozen targets.

As part of this week's deal, countries acknowledged they were falling behind. Catherine Weller, from the environmental charity Fauna & Flora, said that while the agreement was not particularly exciting or detailed, it was good news that countries could reach agreement. She said the world cannot just plod on to 2030 without a course correction, because nature is critical to all life on Earth, to economies and to wellbeing.

Craig Bennett, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, told BBC News that an appalling loss is still being seen, threatening the collapse of ecosystems globally. But he added that the better news is that there are so many examples worldwide of how to turn things around.

Countries have put 623 million acres, or 252 million hectares, of degraded land into protection, an area bigger than Greenland, according to the reporting. Just last month the WWF praised conservation efforts that had achieved the recovery of key species including elephants, green sea turtles and tigers.

Countries have recognised that the main barrier to accelerating those efforts is money. In 2022, they agreed they would put 30 billion dollars towards nature recovery efforts by the end of the decade, and mobilise a further 170 billion dollars from private sources.

But years later, many nations have been redirecting international aid to defence budgets and to deal with repeated energy shocks, so pledges are not at the rate required to reach those targets, according to the UN. At this meeting, more than 1 billion dollars was pledged, with half of that coming from philanthropists including Leonardo DiCaprio's Re:wild organisation.

Anna Ducros, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said there had been some progress on countries committing to reducing subsidies for industries harmful to the environment. A concrete example, she said, is that governments subsidise large-scale fishing that is especially harmful to nature, such as trawling. Right now, she added, governments are paying twice: they know they need to increase spending on nature and climate, but at the same time they are damaging nature.

Little progress was made on the Cali Fund, a funding pot previously set up for private companies that profit from using genetic material found in the environment to donate to. It was estimated up to 3.6 billion dollars could be raised annually, but at the start of the meeting just 10,000 dollars had been pledged. Bennett acknowledged that the fund's voluntary nature makes it difficult to put pressure on companies.

One of the easier issues on the agenda was meant to be the approval of scientific reports into the state of nature. But a small group of countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, were reported to have frustrated that process. French Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut was reported by AFP as saying the attacks on science had bothered her a lot.

Next month countries will gather for the annual climate conference, COP31. Its own science body, the IPCC, has faced similar challenges in the past month with passing its own scientific reports and securing funding. Professor David Lee, from Manchester University, who has worked on previous reports, said the IPCC is no place for political manoeuvring, since its outputs are in humanity's interest.