The final gavel at the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia came down well after sunrise. Delegates at COP17 had negotiated through Friday night and into Saturday morning before Armenia’s environment minister Hambardzum Matevosyan, who chaired the talks, closed the meeting at around 10.20am local time.
The headline outcome is a sober one. Halfway through the Kunming-Montreal framework, the 2022 pact meant to halt and reverse nature loss by the end of the decade, governments carried out their first joint stock-take of its 23 targets. Their verdict: the goals will be missed unless action speeds up sharply. To respond, they adopted the Yerevan Pathway, a plan that asks each country to spell out how it will close its own gaps.
CBD executive secretary Astrid Schomaker did not dress it up, saying progress was “neither fast enough nor sufficiently comprehensive”. Alongside the pathway, the summit agreed new work programmes on protected areas and forests and set operating rules for a body giving Indigenous peoples and local communities a larger say. That last text was only settled at about 8am after calls to capitals.
Choosing the next host turned into a cliffhanger. In a secret ballot Quito, Ecuador, edged out Panama City by 55 votes to 53, so COP18 will be held there in 2028. On digital sequence information, the genetic data that companies use in products, delegates reaffirmed the contribution rates set two years ago and agreed how the Cali Fund will share out its money.
The contrast with Colombia in 2024 is hard to miss. That summit ran so long it lost its quorum and had to reconvene in Rome months later. Yerevan, by contrast, wrapped up every major text on site. Whether it translates into more forests, wetlands and wildlife now depends on national governments.
