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The first official report assessing the global plan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss showed that collective efforts to save nature are insufficient. The Global Review is the first attempt to measure how close governments have come to achieving goals agreed upon almost four years ago under the Global Biodiversity Framework.

Failure to Meet Targets

None of the set targets show fully positive dynamics. National commitments require designating protected lands and water resources equivalent to about 23% of the global total by 2030, which is less than the planned 30% of land and sea. Furthermore, biodiversity financing, which amounted to $186 billion between 2020 and 2023, significantly lags behind the annual goal of $200 billion by 2030.

Christina Egghenter, a global governance policy expert at WWF, noted that while progress has been made, the goals are not being met. She identified insufficient implementation capacity and low national ambition as the main problems.

Armenia Conference as a Turning Point

These findings emerge at a critical moment as negotiators will gather in Yerevan, Armenia, in October for the UN Biodiversity Summit COP17. This summit aims to transform this diagnosis into a course correction plan. Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, stated that COP17 should be viewed as an implementation conference.

Armenia has already defined the focus of the event by choosing the slogan 'Taking Action for Nature.'

Insufficient Progress

The Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted at COP15 in 2022 and is the successor to the Aichi Targets, which expired in 2020 and were almost entirely ignored. The Framework includes 23 targets to be achieved by 2030, as well as four less specific goals for 2050. It expands responsibility beyond just governments, including the private sector, civil society, and indigenous peoples in achieving the goals.

The scale of the problem is enormous: the last comprehensive assessment in 2019 showed that a quarter of assessed species are threatened with extinction, and the rate of species decline is tens and hundreds of times higher than the historical average. Subsequent smaller assessments have found no signs of slowing this decline.

Alejandra Duarte, a policy partner at Women4Biodiversity, an advocacy organization, emphasized that a 'transformation—a change in management, conservation, and economy systems' is required, which is not happening fast enough to meet the ambitions of the 2030 and 2050 goals.

Analysis of National Reports

The Global Review was based on national reports from 129 countries, over 3,700 national targets, as well as materials submitted by businesses, NGOs, and other non-state actors. It describes an 'unprecedented' momentum and engagement around this framework, but concludes that progress 'is not yet happening at the required speed or scale.'

A similar pattern is observed across all 23 targets. The most attention and the most positive self-assessments are drawn to traditional, more easily quantifiable targets—such as protected areas, species conservation, and ecosystem restoration. Meanwhile, targets related to governance, subsidies, biodiversity integration into other sectors, and financing lag the most.

Egghenter noted that some targets are being implemented more actively—in particular, traditional ones like '30 by 30,' which have attracted much attention. However, others, such as driver targets and targets that facilitate effective implementation, are still insufficiently highlighted by stakeholders.

Financial Aspects and Monitoring

Financial figures follow the same pattern. Of the $186 billion mobilized between 2020 and 2023, $136 billion came from domestic government budgets, $33 billion from private sources, and only $18 billion from international public funding. This amount is only a small fraction of the planned annual benchmark of $20 billion that developed countries were supposed to reach by 2025. The report indicates that private financing, conversely, peaked in 2021 and has since declined, making it 'particularly underdeveloped' compared to what the framework suggests.

The main problem is monitoring. Reliable quantitative data exists only for a small number of targets. Information remains scarce regarding how, or if at all, indigenous peoples, women, youth, and the private sector are involved in implementing these targets.

Ana Di Pangrazio, deputy director of the Argentine environmental NGO Farn, reported that the review reflects a pattern she had previously observed. Countries that promised to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies often began mapping them but rarely enacted the necessary regulations for the actual redirection of funds. She added that 'we are repeating past mistakes,' and increasing biodiversity financing while continuing to support its destruction elsewhere will not lead to results.

What Awaits Negotiators

This diagnosis now passes to the negotiators. At COP17, governments will have to agree on how to interpret the findings of the Global Review. Juliette Landry, senior research fellow on international biodiversity governance at the Parisian think tank IDDRI, said that countries are reluctant to present too negative a picture due to the 'fragile state of multilateralism.'

Countries want the review to show that the framework is still working, even if they acknowledge gaps. Landry also noted that developing countries tend to insist that wealthy nations have not provided promised funding, while others focus on weak sectoral coordination or insufficient technical capacity.

It remains an open question whether the final text of the COP decision will achieve a level of detail, such as identifying the sectors most responsible for biodiversity loss, similar to how the UN Climate Review Council pointed to fossil fuels. Linking responsibility to specific industries or countries is politically complex in a consensus-based process.

Finance will be the main issue determining everything else in Yerevan. Schomaker linked the trust in the summit to whether it can bring business and financial institutions in as full participants. She wrote that 'private financing should not be present merely to make promises on the side'; it must become part of the main discussion on how biodiversity is integrated into economic and financial decision-making.

However, Alejandra Duarte believes the problem is not just about volume. Even with increased pledges, most of the funds do not reach groups engaged in real conservation work on the ground. This is because access to them usually requires formal institutional structures and reporting systems that are lacking in both grassroots and indigenous-led organizations.

The Cali Fund was adopted at COP16 to channel benefits from the commercial use of genetic data back to indigenous peoples and local communities. Nevertheless, it remains voluntary, and Duarte believes the same access problem applies to it: 'The architecture of financing itself needs to directly reach these groups.' She cited a project of her organization that directed funds directly to women-led restoration work in six countries in Africa and Latin America.

For Egghenter, hope lies in COP17 becoming the moment when governments stop merely cataloging shortcomings and start setting deadlines for their elimination. She concluded: 'Commitments have been made, and now we have the Global Review telling us what needs to be done. The final COP text must make decisions on next steps, set deadlines, and provide an idea of how countries are uniting to address these gaps.'

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