YEREVAN — A 2025 money deadline in the world’s nature pact has probably passed unmet, a United Nations report says, as governments gathered in the Armenian capital on Sunday for the opening of the pact’s first global review.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared COP17 open, Xinhua reported, with the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity due to conduct that review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in 2022. The convention’s calendar lists formal sessions from October 19 to 30.
The deadline sits in Target 19, which asks developed countries to raise international biodiversity finance for developing nations to at least $20 billion a year by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030, inside a $200 billion annual goal from all sources. A report from the convention’s secretariat, released this week, says the data “suggest that the 2025 milestone was likely not met.”
Two tallies exist, and both fall short. Parties reporting under the finance indicator put international public finance at $5.2 billion in 2023, their highest year, and $17.7 billion across 2020 to 2023, which the secretariat’s full report calls a minimum. The OECD, counting a broader set of flows, estimates about $16.8 billion for 2023. By TEH’s arithmetic, the OECD figure sits roughly 16 per cent below $20 billion, and the parties’ figure is about a quarter of it. They cover different ranges of flows, and the report says a definitive assessment waits on complete 2024 and 2025 data.
Guterres put the shortfall in different terms on Friday, UN News reported. He told the leaders’ summit that biodiversity financing is less than half of the $200 billion agreed, and that current pledges would protect only 26 per cent of land ecosystems by 2030, short of the land conservation target of 30 per cent, and 12 per cent of marine ones. UN News does not give the base for the “less than half” figure.
The report’s own 2023 ledger is lower still. International public, domestic public and private money came to $32.7 billion, about 16 per cent of $200 billion by TEH’s arithmetic. The report warns that some countries’ figures are probably undercounts because they lack systems to tag biodiversity spending.
The European Commission says the EU is on track to double international biodiversity funding from €3.5 billion to €7 billion, a 2021 pledge by President Ursula von der Leyen. Its page, dated October 16, does not mention the $20 billion milestone.
What none of these documents settles is the 2025 figure itself. The convention says more than 70 per cent of its 196 parties have filed national reports, which by TEH’s arithmetic leaves at most 58 without one, and its report says small island states are underrepresented in the data. Whether the missing numbers arrive before delegates leave on October 30 is not stated in anything TEH has read.
