Leaders grapple with finance and harmful subsidies at UN’s COP17 biodiversity conference – news – Mongabay

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YEREVAN, Armenia — Visitors entering the main hallway of the 2026 U.N. biodiversity conference (COP17) encounter a mural of a herd of elephants. The installation, led by the NGO Friends of the Earth International, doesn’t celebrate the gains that some elephant populations have made in recent decades. Instead, it uses the “elephants in the room” metaphor for the entrenched, but often-ignored financial systems that lead to widespread biodiversity destruction.
“It is astounding that the global economy is spending only $1 on nature protection for each $30 that it spends on nature destruction,” said An Lambrechts, a biodiversity politics expert with Greenpeace International, at a COP17 press conference. Lambrechts was referring to a key finding from the State of Finance for Nature 2026 report from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).
WWF International’s recent Living Planet report found that populations of wild vertebrates fell by an average of 73% between 1970 and 2022. The authors tagged climate change, agriculture and — notably — the flow of money toward nature-averse industries and practices.
The 196 parties that adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) in 2022 laid out the ambition in its Target 18 of slashing $500 billion annually from subsidies and other financial support for activities that harm biodiversity. Unsustainable fishing and industrial agriculture, for example, contribute directly to the dwindling of plant, animal and fungal life.
But financial support for such “nature-negative” activities remains high — at $7.3 trillion per year, according to UNEP.
“Nature is not a luxury we protect when economies can afford it,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, in a statement. “Nature is what makes economies possible. The arrival of finance ministers at COP 17 sends an important signal. Biodiversity loss is not simply an environmental problem. It is an economic problem, and the solutions must reach into the heart of economic decision-making.”
And if funding for biodiversity destruction remains high, promised spending to protect ecosystems has not materialized.
The GBF set a target of spending at least $200 billion every year across all sources to stem the loss of species and reverse it by the end of the decade. But a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggests that annual biodiversity finance by 2025 totaled no more than $92 billion.
“The finance gap has to be addressed at the urgency that is necessary to tackle the biodiversity crisis,” Lambrechts said.
There has been some progress: Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister and the COP17 president, announced on Oct. 26 that COP17 had marshaled around $1.8 billion in new financing for the conservation of nature. But key questions remain about the amounts of money going to nature, who gets it and how quickly it’s reaching the ground.
“The finance gap has to be addressed at the urgency that is necessary to tackle the biodiversity crisis,” Lambrechts said.
A key announcement came from the Netherlands on Oct. 26, with its $500 million commitment to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). The facility, launched at the 2025 U.N. climate conference, aims to reward tropical forest countries for keeping deforestation rates low. It also comes with the provision that at least 20% of the payments would go to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Also on Oct. 26, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a financial institution for international environment bodies including the Convention on Biological Diversity, said it had pulled together another half billion dollars in financing for nature. About $60 million of that sum is going to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, with its explicit mandate to help implement the GBF.
The recently established Species Recovery Alliance, comprising private donors and organizations, pledged another $500 million to help threatened species on Oct. 16 ahead of the official start of COP17. The Value Nature Fund announced it was investing 300 million Euros (about $334 million) in regenerative practices for forests and farms in Europe and North America.
On Oct. 27, Germany said it had a 300 million Euro ($334 million) package combining public and private financing for the Legacy Landscapes Fund, which will in part help support other countries in carrying out National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), which are meant to serve as both assessments of progress and map out plans to integrate protection for biodiversity into national economies.
At the same time, money to set up and manage the protected areas that contributed to the 30 by 30 target has dropped in recent years, according to an analysis led by the NGO Campaign for Nature, from $1.2 billion in 2023 to $1 billion in 2025.
What’s more, getting money to the Global South, where most of the world’s biodiversity lives, has proved a persistent challenge. The GBF set targets for getting annual funding of $20 billion by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030 from Global North to Global South countries. The OECD report suggests this international finance likely fell $4 billion short in 2025.
Other tools aimed at goading funding from wealthy parts of the world have flagged: The Cali Fund had the goal of attracting $1 billion a year drawn from the revenues and profits of companies that benefit from genetics found in nature, with at least 50% of the money earmarked for Indigenous peoples and local communities. But at the close of COP17 (just before 11 a.m. Armenia Time on Oct. 31), the Cali Fund has received only just over $10,000 in deposits since its inception.
Meanwhile, at roughly the halfway point between 2022 and 2030, the biennial biodiversity COP offers a chance to take stock of how parties to the framework are addressing its goals and targets: The cornerstone 30 by 30 target of the GBF calling for the protection of 30% of the world’s land and waters by 2030 is off course. In fact, a U.N. review of the framework published just ahead of COP17 found that 22 of the 23 targets are off-track.
The context of these announcements and the wrangling over how monies should be distributed is set against a looming backdrop of existing support for the destruction of nature. Addressing harmful subsidies meaningfully “will have a snowball effect on other targets,” Guido Broekhoven, interim global director of multilateral policy at WWF International, said in a COP17 press conference.
“We cannot continue subsidizing the destruction of nature at the same time as trying to find the money that is needed for implementation of action.”
Related to these subsidies are tax benefits – for example, those that encourage oil and gas production – with the potential to destroy nature.
“Tax incentives for destructive businesses and illicit financial flows are as indefensible and untenable as misdirected subsidies,” Lambrechts said. “These resources should instead flow to those at the front lines of nature protection.”
To date, only about a quarter of NBSAPs from signatories to the GBF account for these flows of support, Lambrechts added.
Still, she said, there had been “encouraging signs” at COP17 that leaders would back a pathway for addressing harmful incentives — one “that defines a concrete and tangible way forward to reform and phase out these harmful subsidies, because it is irrational for countries to commit to finance nature protection while continuing to reward destructive industries.”
On Oct. 26, Armenia launched the Yerevan Call on Incentives Positive to Biodiversity. And Matevosyan, the country’s environment minister and COP17 president, has thrown his support behind a group of parties to the convention called the Friends of Target 18 that aims to encourage cooperation on confronting these subsidies.
“Our work here in Yerevan can influence how natural resources are used, how goods are produced and consumed, and where public and private financial resources are directed,” Matevosyan said in a statement.
For its part, Armenia has analyzed 24 of its programs that receive public financing for their possible impacts on biodiversity, leading to recommendations aimed at “more positive outcomes for nature,” according to the UNDP’s BIOFIN site.
Alfred DeGemmis, director of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said there are “real political challenges to undertaking subsidy reform.” But he said the leadership of Armenia has helped bring subsidies to the fore of the convention.
“I think there is consensus that they are no longer an elephant in the room that we can’t speak of, or it’s too complex to take on,” DeGemmis told Mongabay. “But rather, it’s something that we have to figure out.”
Ashoka Mukpo contributed reporting.
Banner image: A Panama queen (Aphelandra sinclairiana). Image by John Cannon/Mongabay.
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
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