COP17: Global South struggles to protect ocean as money fails to flow

On the southern coast of Argentina, in the waters of a sanctuary that covers 3,000 sq km, giant petrels soar on the gusty winds while humpback whales, South American fur sea lions and Magellanic penguins feed and breed.

Patagonia’s Azul provincial park is already the size of the US’s famous Yosemite. Mariana Cassini, marine conservation director at Rewilding Argentina, is pushing to make it even bigger. Her hoped-for 30% extension of this protected area, which bans extractive activities such as fishing, would better protect migrating humpback whales, local sharks and seabird breeding grounds.

This should be an easy argument to make with those in power: four years ago, as nature loss reached an historic level, governments including Argentina promised to conserve 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030. 

Halfway to the 2030 deadline, the target remains far out of reach. Cassini says her government is slashing environmental budgets and local conservationists are overstretched. When she goes to capacity-starved local government offices to discuss marine protection, the response often is “I don’t have time” or “Let’s talk next week.”

This gap between promises and action, money and ambition, globally set targets and local-level implementation, was central to debates in the meeting rooms and hallways of the UN’s recent biodiversity conference, COP17.

Global South struggles

For two weeks last month, 140 ministers and over 9,000 delegates, academics, business and civil society representatives and members of Indigenous groups met at COP17 in Yerevan, Armenia. Their aim was to address the pledges made four years ago under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. 

Marine conservationists told Dialogue Earth the global ambitions have not been translated into reality in many developing countries. They said they often lack the funding, local capacity and scientific and technological knowledge to scale up protection, or even to begin to deliver effective protection of their oceans.

Several Global South environment ministers told Dialogue Earth they lack the money to properly support protection. They blamed wealthier nations for not following through on promised funding. 

This has contributed to just 10% of the ocean being protected globally, according to a recent report produced in partnership with NGOs including WWF and the Marine Conservation Institute, and funded by Bloomberg. Not all this protection really counts either, say some experts – only 3.5% is generally agreed to be effectively protected.

South American fur seals sunbathe on the rocky coast of the Patagonia Azul provincial park (Image: Horacio Barbieri)

At the talks that agreed the 30% target, developed countries pledged to contribute at least USD 20 billion per year in public finance by 2025 for global biodiversity protection. This would then rise to USD 30 billion by 2030. In 2024 (the latest available data), USD 18.9 billion was given, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

Ocean protection funding is worse than the overall biodiversity numbers suggest, however.

In 2018, only 4% of bilateral and 9% of multilateral biodiversity development funding went to marine protection, according to the OECD. Negotiations around finance at meetings like Yerevan’s rarely specify how much marine ecosystems should get.

Those on the frontlines and coastlines find themselves short of what they need to protect the ocean, according to COP17 attendees Dialogue Earth spoke to.

“There are a lot of ambitions about how to reach these kinds of goals,” said El-Hacen Mohamed El-Hacen, a conservationist for the largest protected area in West Africa: Banc d’Arguin national park, which protects 3.7% of Mauritania’s waters. “The problem is, do we have the means to reach them?”

Mohamed El-Hacen’s answer: not really. He told Dialogue Earth that massive amounts of plastic waste arrived from outside the park, and heavy metals from nearby gold mining pollute Banc d’Arguin. Funding and expertise to tackle them are absent, he said.

Countries at COP17 appeared to recognise this. Negotiators agreed to “note with concern” in the final text that “marine and coastal ecosystems consistently receive less attention” than terrestrial ecosystems. The document also urges nations to accelerate ocean protection actions.  

More money for defence, less for nature

When explaining why their marine protection records trail the targets their governments have agreed, environmental ministers from developing countries also point to the sluggishness among developed countries in delivering that promised USD 20 billion.   

“They are not doing enough,” Senegal’s environment minister Aliou Gori Diouf told Dialogue Earth outside Yerevan’s ocean pavilion. (Perhaps tellingly, this was the first-ever dedicated space for the ocean at a UN Biodiversity COP.)

Senegal’s environment minister Aliou Gori Diouf speaks at the ocean pavilion. He says West African countries are developing a proposal for a marine reserve in the high seas (Image: Regina Lam)

Senegal protects less than 4% of its waters. The minister said his government plans to double this by 2030 but more funding from developed nations is key: “We do not need more conversation. We need actions in terms of financial mobilisation.” 

Sierra Leone’s environment minister, Jiwoh Abdulai, also put the stalling protection efforts down to insufficient financing. His country protects less than 2% of its waters. Promised funding and capacity building could help communities transition to more sustainable farming and fishing practices and better protect the nation’s coastal ecosystems, he added.

Abdulai contrasted the slow delivery of promised biodiversity funding with rapidly escalating defence spending. The United Kingdom, France and Germany have all announced cuts in development funding while growing defence spending in recent budgets. The German government, currently the largest bilateral funder to projects protecting biodiversity, proposed a 6% cut to development assistance in its 2027 draft budget, according to local media. Meanwhile, defence spending was edging towards an increase of nearly 33%.

As COP17 came to an end with a 12-hour final plenary, nations managed to agree the broad principles of what a future permanent biodiversity finance mechanism will look like. These include building a fair, equitable, inclusive structure. Finance discussions yielded the idea that the wealthiest emerging economies could join developed nations in becoming donor states to the mooted biodiversity protection fund, and the USD 30 billion aid target. But this is still couched in voluntary terms only.

“Some of my developed country counterparts are dancing around the issue of adequate financing for biodiversity,” concluded Abdulai.

‘The country has another reality’

Several ocean advocates told Dialogue Earth that the Global Biodiversity Framework and the targets that come with it are still worth fighting for.

“Without the agreement, it makes the increased ambition and the delivery even more difficult,” said Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who played a major role in negotiating the framework four years ago.

Representatives of Indigenous peoples demand meaningful inclusion at the decision-making table at COP17 (Image: Regina Lam)

He said countries can still pick up the pace and reach 30% by 2030: “I’m not saying it’s going to be a walk in the park. I’m not saying it’s going to be implemented with the same resolve and determination everywhere. But I think we can make it.”

Cassini still believes in the target, too. But in Patagonia, the mismatch between global commitments and support for local action is obvious, she said.

Faced with what Cassini sees as government indifference, her team is trying to make Patagonia Azul provincial park a priority by turning it into a tourism destination, with camp sites and trekking paths. It could create jobs and growth opportunities, to demonstrate for government officials that ocean protection can be economically appealing.

Cassini is learning that money for protecting the ocean might not simply materialise: “If you go just with a proposal of conservation – in Argentina at least – they will not answer the phone.”

Regina Lam travelled to CBD COP17 in Yeveran, Armenia with the support of Bloomberg Ocean Initiative. All Dialogue Earth content is editorially independent.