The collective push to save nature is insufficient. That’s the headline from the first formal report card on the world’s plan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
The Global Review is the first attempt to measure how far governments have come to meeting the targets they agreed to nearly four years ago under the Global Biodiversity Framework. None of the targets were deemed to be on a fully positive trajectory.
National commitments would bring protected land and water to roughly 23% worldwide by 2030 – short of the 30×30 goal to protect 30% of the Earth’s land and sea by 2030. Meanwhile, biodiversity funding (USD 186 billion mobilised between 2020 and 2023) remains far below the USD 200 billion annual target set for 2030.
“Progress was made, but we are not on track to achieve the targets,” Cristina Eghenter, a global governance policy expert at WWF, told Dialogue Earth. She identified a lack of implementation capacity and low national ambition as the core problems.
The findings arrive at a pivotal moment. In October, negotiators will gather in Yerevan, Armenia, for the UN biodiversity summit COP17, tasked with turning this diagnosis into a course correction. “COP17 is to be seen as a conference on implementation,” Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, has said.
Armenia has already signalled where it wants the focus to be: Taking Action for Nature is the conference’s tagline.
Progress, but not enough
The Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted at COP15 in 2022. It is the successor to the Aichi Targets, which expired in 2020 having been almost entirely missed.
Overall, it includes 23 targets to be delivered by 2030 and four less-specific 2050 goals. The framework broadens responsibility beyond governments. It integrates the private sector, civil society and Indigenous peoples into the process of realising the targets.
The scale of what it is meant to address is stark. The last comprehensive assessment, in 2019, found a quarter of assessed species threatened with extinction, with species disappearing tens to hundreds of times faster than the historical average. Smaller-scale follow-up assessments have since found no sign of the decline slowing.
“What’s required is a transformation – changing governance, conservation and economic systems,” Alejandra Duarte, policy associate at Women4Biodiversity, an advocacy organisation, told Dialogue Earth. “That is not being achieved at the pace needed to reach the ambition of the goals for 2030 and 2050,” she said.
The Global Review drew on national reports from 129 countries, more than 3,700 national targets, and submissions from businesses, NGOs and other non-state actors. It describes “unprecedented” momentum and engagement around the framework, but finds that progress “is not yet occurring at the pace or scale required.”
The pattern across all 23 targets is consistent. Traditional, easier-to-quantify goals – protected areas, species conservation, ecosystem restoration – draw the most national attention and the most positive self-assessments. While targets tied to governance, subsidies, mainstreaming biodiversity into other sectors, and finance lag furthest behind.
“Some targets are being implemented more – the more traditional ones, such as 30 by 30, which stole the spotlight,” said Eghenter. “But others, such as driver targets and targets that promote enabling conditions for effective implementation, are not yet addressed as strongly by parties.”
The finance numbers follow the same shape. Of the USD 186 billion mobilised between 2020 and 2023, 136 billion came from domestic public budgets, 33 billion from private sources and just 18 billion from international public funding. This is a fraction of the USD 20 billion annual milestone that developed countries were supposed to hit by 2025. Private finance, the report notes, actually peaked in 2021 and has since declined, leaving it “particularly underdeveloped” relative to what the framework assumes it will deliver.
Underlying this situation is a monitoring problem. Solid quantitative data exists for only a handful of targets. Information remains thin on how, or if, Indigenous peoples, women, youth and the private sector are being brought into realising the targets.
Ana Di Pangracio, deputy director of Farn, an Argentine environmental NGO, told Dialogue Earth that the review echoes a pattern she had seen before. Countries that pledged to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies, she said, have often started mapping them but rarely followed through with the regulations needed to actually redirect the money. “We’re repeating past mistakes,” she said. Pouring more money into biodiversity while continuing to bankroll its destruction elsewhere won’t move the needle, she adds.
The test ahead
That diagnosis now moves to negotiators. At COP17, governments will have to agree on how to interpret the Global Review’s findings.
“Parties don’t want to have a narrative that’s too negative, because of the [precarious] state of multilateralism,” Juliette Landry, a senior research fellow on international biodiversity governance at IDDRI, a Paris-based think-tank, told Dialogue Earth.
Countries want the review to show the framework is still working even as they accept that gaps have to be acknowledged, she said.
Developing countries tend to press the point that wealthy nations haven’t delivered promised funding, while others emphasise weak sectoral coordination or thin technical capacity, Landry said.
Whether the final COP decision text goes as far as naming the sectors most responsible for biodiversity loss – the way the UN’s climate stocktake singled out fossil fuels – remains an open question, she added. Pinning responsibility on specific industries or countries is politically fraught in a process built on consensus.
Finance will be the fight that shapes everything else in Yerevan. Schomaker (executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity) has tied the summit’s credibility to whether it can bring business and financial institutions into the room as full participants. “Private finance should not be there simply to make pledges on the sidelines,” she wrote. “It should be part of the core conversation about how biodiversity becomes embedded in economic and financial decision-making.”
But volume isn’t the only problem, said Alejandra Duarte. Even as more money gets pledged, little of it reaches the groups actually doing conservation work on the ground, she said. This is because accessing it typically requires the kind of formal institutional structures and reporting systems that grassroots and Indigenous-led organisations don’t have.
The Cali Fund was adopted at COP16 to channel benefits from the commercial use of genetic data back to Indigenous peoples and local communities. But it remains voluntary, and Duarte thinks the same access problem applies to it: “What’s needed is for the funding architecture itself to reach these groups directly.” She pointed to a project her own organisation ran, which moved money straight to women-led restoration efforts in six countries across Africa and Latin America.
For Eghenter, the hope is that COP17 becomes the moment governments stop just cataloguing shortfalls and start setting deadlines to close them: “Commitments have been made and we now have the Global Review that tells us what has to be done. The COP final text should make decisions on what comes next, give us deadlines and a sense of countries coming together to address those gaps.”
