COP17 ends with calls for UN biodiversity summit reform

Cop17 wrapped Saturday in Yerevan with a familiar pattern: governments restated commitments they have failed to meet for 34 years. The targets themselves are concrete – protect 30% of the planet for nature, restore a third of degraded ecosystems, redirect $500bn in environmentally damaging subsidies – but the mechanism for delivering them remains broken.

The criticism is sharp. Critics argue the consensus-based decision-making allows single countries to block progress, describing the system as allowing "one idiot" to stall advancement. This structural flaw has become indefensible; a process designed for agreement has instead become a forum for obstruction.

Countries will leave Yerevan having promised to "redouble efforts", a phrase that carries the weight of three decades of broken commitments. The convention has never met a single biodiversity target in its 34-year history. That record is not accidental – it reflects both political will and systemic dysfunction.

The calls for reform are justified. A process that cannot translate stated targets into delivered outcomes is not a mechanism – it is theatre. The question now is whether governments will treat reform as urgent or continue cycling through summits where announcements substitute for action. The biodiversity crisis does not operate on consensus timelines. Either the system adapts to match the scale of ecosystem loss, or it becomes formally irrelevant while destruction continues.

‘Bunch of baloney’: calls grow for Cop summit reforms as countries on track to fail nature targets

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