In October 2026, governments from around the world will gather in Yerevan, Armenia, for the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The meeting comes at a pivotal moment: halfway through the implementation of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022. Beyond the diplomatic calendar, COP17 raises a more fundamental question. The world already agreed on what needs to be done for biodiversity in 2022. Now, we are wondering whether the Convention has built a governance system capable of holding governments collectively accountable for delivering on those promises.

The first global stocktake for biodiversity

One of the major innovations of the Kunming–Montreal Framework was the creation of a global review of collective progress inspired by the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement (see Decision 15/6). Rather than assessing countries individually, the exercise evaluates whether collective national efforts add up to the level of ambition required to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. This process has been led jointly by two subsidiary bodies of the Convention—the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) and the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI)—with the support of an ad hoc technical expert group bringing together scientists and a broad range of stakeholders, including Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs).

The review draws on several sources of evidence (see Decision 16/32). Most importantly, Parties were required to submit their Seventh National Reports by March 2026. The response has been encouraging: 125 countries submitted their reports on time (source: CBD), a notable improvement over the 103 submissions received for the Sixth National Reports. These reports are also more robust than previous reporting exercises, as they are explicitly structured around the GBF monitoring framework, which provides a common set of indicators to assess progress towards each target. The global review also relies on assessments produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), as well as other peer-reviewed scientific and technical evidence.

A sobering picture

Although the process itself represents progress, the emerging findings are far less encouraging. The first draft of the global report suggests that many of the implementation challenges identified under the previous Strategic Plan for Biodiversity remain unresolved. While countries have translated parts of the Global Biodiversity Framework into their national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs), collective national ambition still falls well short of the ambition embodied in the global framework itself. Progress is also highly uneven across the 23 targets.

Some encouraging developments can be observed under Target 3, the commitment to conserve at least 30% of land and sea by 2030. Protected areas continue to expand, demonstrating that quantitative conservation targets can generate political momentum. Yet this apparent success should be interpreted with caution. Target 3 is not merely about reaching a numerical threshold. It also requires protected areas to be effectively managed, ecologically representative, well connected and equitably governed. In other words, countries may achieve the famous « 30×30 » headline while still falling short of the target’s broader ambition.

There has also been progress in mainstreaming biodiversity across public policies and economic sectors. However, these efforts have yet to produce the transformative changes needed in sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, infrastructure and finance, where biodiversity pressures remain particularly acute. Marine and coastal biodiversity also appears to receive comparatively less attention than terrestrial ecosystems, raising concerns about the balance of implementation efforts.Perhaps most strikingly, Target 19 on resource mobilisation emerges as one of the weakest areas of implementation. Financial commitments remain poorly reflected in national biodiversity strategies, despite the widespread recognition that insufficient funding is one of the principal barriers to implementation.

From incremental progress to transformative change

If the diagnosis is increasingly clear, where should governments look for solutions? A significant part of the answer may lie in the IPBES Assessment Report on Transformative Change, published in 2024. Rather than calling for incremental improvements, the report argues that halting biodiversity loss requires deep systemic changes across economic, political and social systems. It identifies the need to reform harmful subsidies, transform production and consumption patterns, improve governance across sectors and strengthen the role of IPLCs in decision-making. These conclusions are likely to feature prominently in discussions at COP17. Addressing the indirect drivers of biodiversity loss will require governments to rethink the economic systems that continue to incentivise environmental degradation.

The real negotiations: implementation and finance

Ultimately, the most consequential negotiations in Yerevan are unlikely to concern new biodiversity targets. Instead, they will focus on the means of implementation needed to achieve the commitments already made. Finance will remain at the heart of these discussions. Initiatives such as BIOFIN have helped many countries develop biodiversity finance plans and better understand their financing needs. However, these exercises have largely succeeded in identifying funding gaps rather than closing them. Mobilising sufficient public and private finance remains an unresolved challenge. Negotiations on the Convention’s financial mechanism will therefore deserve particularly close attention. Equally important will be the political outcome of the global review itself. As with the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement, the scientific assessment is only the starting point. Parties will ultimately negotiate how to interpret the findings, how explicitly to acknowledge implementation gaps and what political guidance should emerge from the process.