In 2022, the world’s governments signed a deal in Montreal promising to halt the destruction of nature by 2030 and to pay for it. The 2030 part has a date on it, and so does the paying part: at least $200 billion a year from all sources by 2030, with at least $30 billion a year of that flowing from rich countries to poorer ones. Last week, at the UN biodiversity conference in Yerevan, Armenia, they checked how it was going. Badly, it turns out. So they agreed a plan to go faster. What they didn’t do was agree on where the money comes from, which, as Kenza Bryan reported for the Financial Times (republished by Ars Technica), is still the hole in the middle of the whole thing.
The plan is called the Yerevan Pathway, and according to UN News it came with close to $2 billion in fresh commitments from governments, philanthropists and businesses, announced to coincide with the gathering. Here is the simple arithmetic: $2 billion is 1% of $200 billion. Sure, those are different kinds of numbers. The $200 billion is an annual target and the $2 billion is new pledges at a single meeting, so it’s not as if the gap is 99% of the job. But it does give you the scale.
Catherine Weller, global policy director at the campaign group Fauna & Flora, called the agreement welcome while noting how far the funding fell short of the 2022 pledge. “In a world of trillionaires, we can certainly afford to spend $200 billion a year on protecting and restoring the very thing keeping us all alive: nature,” she said. I think that is right as far as it goes, and it explains everything wrong with biodiversity finance. The world can afford a lot of things. The question is always who, specifically, writes the check, and “the world” does not have a checking account.
What the Pathway says
The Pathway isn’t really a standalone document. It’s the name for the parts of the first global review of the Montreal framework that tell countries to scale up. Carbon Brief’s rundown of the outcomes has the review language: it “notes with deep concern” that the targets “will not be achieved” without rapid acceleration, “urges” faster implementation “including by increased ambition,” and warns that the 2050 goals “may be at risk.” On subsidies that damage nature, which run to about $1.8 trillion a year against a target of cutting $500 billion a year by 2030, the text “encourages” reform “in accordance with national circumstances.” Translated, that means do it if you feel like it. According to Carbon Brief, 84% of countries missed the 2025 deadline merely to identify their harmful subsidies, never mind cut them.
Developed countries also missed their interim goal of at least $20 billion a year in international biodiversity finance by 2025. Meanwhile the money is heading the wrong way. International funding for protected and conserved areas has dropped in several countries after years of war and high energy prices, and environmental funding is set to fall 27% over 2026 to 2030. If you’re trying to get from $20 billion to $30 billion while your donors cut their budgets by about a quarter, that is a hard trade.
Who pays, and who decides who pays
The obvious fix is more payers. The UN’s list of developed countries obliged to contribute was last amended in 2006, and a bloc of rich countries pushed to add the likes of China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and India. “It’s been 20 years since that list was added to, times have changed and there are new realities,” said Ireland’s Christopher O’Sullivan. The result: countries that want to join can “signal interest” before the next conference and at every other one after that, joining requires their explicit consent, and voluntary contributions don’t count as joining. So the list of who has to pay is now a list you put yourself on. Things are going about how you’d expect.
Then there’s the Cali Fund, created to collect money from companies that profit from digital genetic sequence data drawn from nature. The suggested rate is 0.1% of revenue or 1% of profit. Imagine a company with $10 billion in revenue that leans on such data: at the suggested rate it would owe $10 million a year. Total pledges to the fund by the end of COP17, according to Carbon Brief: $10,565, with less than $9,000 actually deposited. Not one large company that relies on this data has paid in. You can build an elaborate framework for voluntary payments, and companies will, mostly, decline to make them voluntarily.
The Brazil part
The biggest chunk of new money was a $500 million commitment from the Netherlands to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a Brazilian scheme that pays countries to leave their forests standing. That’s about a quarter of the conference’s total haul in one pledge. The Dutch announced it in parliament the day after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won re-election as Brazil’s president, which many at the summit greeted with relief. The timing is suggestive, though the reporting doesn’t say whether it was deliberate. A fund that pays to keep forests intact is a long-term bet on the government running it, and the bet looks better once you know who that government will be.
After the conference closed, Carina Pimenta, Brazil’s national secretary for bioeconomy, pointed to Lula’s record on protecting the Amazon. “At a time of growing global uncertainty, the Yerevan Declaration sends a powerful message: world leaders recognize that protecting biodiversity is essential to food security, livelihoods, and economic resilience,” she said. Brian O’Donnell, director at Campaign for Nature, said the growing number of countries with national biodiversity plans and the new Brazilian pledge were “reasons for cautious optimism.”
A permanent financial mechanism to pay for nature after 2030 now formally exists, according to Carbon Brief. Its actual form was put off to COP18, in Quito, Ecuador, in 2028. That leaves two years until 2030 to work out how the money will be raised for the targets that will not be met by 2030.