—The biodiversity finance gap is still about $700 billion to $1.3 trillion annually. Nations with nature laws might jump to 75 from ~50 now.

By Mathew Carr *

The decision to adopt the Yerevan Pathway yesterday acts primarily as an accelerator and locking mechanism, rather than a completely isolated driver of better nature- protection laws.

Much of that momentum was already built into the multi-year international schedule, but yesterday’s outcome provides the specific political pressure needed to turn draft policies into binding law.

See below for why it is ultimately disappointing.

What Was Already in the Pipeline

• The 2030 Horizon: When the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) set the “30×30” targets, it established 2030 as the firm deadline. Because parliamentary legislative cycles take 2 to 4 years from drafting to enactment, many of the nature bills expected to pass between 2026 and 2028 were already in national drafting stages.
• Regional Legal Mandates: Major supranational directives—most notably the EU Nature Restoration Law—already legally bind member states to pass domestic enforcement acts regardless of individual UN conference outcomes.

What Yesterday’s Deal Directly Spurs

• Eliminating Stalling Tactics: Without yesterday’s finalized Global Review framework and tighter two-year reporting cycles, draft legislation in many parliamentary democracies frequently stalls in legislative committees or gets quietly shelved during electoral transitions. The shortened review window creates public accountability that forces governments to move bills to a final vote.
• Forcing Agriculture & Finance Amendments: Because the Yerevan deal explicitly mandates whole-of-government implementation, ministries like Trade, Agriculture, and Finance must align their statutory frameworks. Environment ministries can issue soft administrative guidelines on their own, but financial and agricultural shifts require explicit statutory amendments passed by parliament.
• Unlocking “On-the-Fence” Nations: For 10 to 15 middle-income countries holding off due to administrative or financial uncertainty, the adoption of standardized monitoring standards and updated finance channels provides the requisite technical baseline to justify passing binding domestic laws.

Without yesterday’s agreement, many of the 15 to 25 countries that might legislate during the next three years would have likely relied on voluntary ministerial policies rather than risking the political capital needed to pass enforceable acts of parliament.

*with Gemini

Note

Why not so fast??

The core timeline covers roughly 3 to 4 years, driven primarily by the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) at COP15 in December 2022.

The Timeline Breakdown

• The 2022 Benchmark (Kunming-Montreal Agreement): When the “30×30” protection targets were formally agreed upon in late 2022, international commitments lacked enforceable domestic mechanics. Most of the ~40–50 countries that currently have binding parliamentary acts passed them between early 2023 and 2026.
• Pre-Existing Frameworks (The Head Start): A handful of jurisdictions had already set legislative foundations prior to the global agreement:
  • UK: Passed the Environment Act 2021, which created legally binding 2030 species abundance targets.
  • European Union: Began drafting its Nature Restoration Law in 2022, which was eventually finalized and adopted in 2024 to create statutory obligations across its 27 member states.
• Post-2022 Legislative Wave: The bulk of those 40 to 50 countries enacted their national laws during a 24- to 36-month window as parliamentary systems adapted to the global targets.

Key Reality: International Law vs. Statutory Drafting

While the broader UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has been active since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, countries historically treated treaty ratification as policy guidance rather than passing hard domestic statutes.

The transition from broad international declarations to specific, enforceable parliamentary acts (with civil penalties, mandatory restoration targets, and sector restrictions) has largely occurred within the past 3 to 4 years.

So fewer nations may pass nature laws in the next three years than the past three.

The USA staying out of the system is shameful.

With Gemini

Disappointing

The outcome of COP17 in Yerevan is widely considered disappointing by environmental scientists, NGOs, and several government delegations because it identified massive implementation failures without providing the enforcement tools or money to fix them.

While the adoption of the Yerevan Pathway acknowledges that the world is missing nearly all of its 2030 nature targets, observers point to several critical shortcomings:

1. Re-Stating Goals Instead of Mandating Action

Critics (including the Wildlife Conservation Society and Greenpeace) note that the final Yerevan text leans heavily on previously agreed language from 2022 rather than setting concrete, hard deadlines for countries that are lagging behind. It creates tighter review loops, but gives nations an easy pass on converting those reviews into legally binding domestic legislation.

2. The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Finance Gap Remains Unfilled

The central point of friction at COP17 was funding:

• The biodiversity finance gap is estimated at $700 billion to $1.3 trillion annually.
• Developed nations offered modest top-ups to the Global Environment Facility ($4.4 billion cycle pool) and small initial seed contributions (like China’s $21 million launch fund), but completely resisted demands from developing nations for a structural, dedicated global nature fund.
• Developing countries argue that asking them to enforce strict domestic land protection without direct international transfers is an unfunded mandate.

3. The Cali Fund Flop

The summit highlighted the near-total failure of the “Cali Fund”—the mechanism established to raise money from corporations using Digital Sequence Information (genetic data used in pharmaceuticals and agritech). Designed to collect up to $1 billion annually for Indigenous communities and conservation, voluntary corporate compliance has yielded virtually nothing, leaving observers to call the framework “on life support” due to corporate free-riding and a lack of mandatory contributions.

4. No Hard Mandates on Harmful Subsidies

While the text “reaffirmed” the pledge to phase out $500 billion a year in environmentally destructive government subsidies (such as industrial agriculture and fossil fuel inputs), it provided no binding roadmap or penalty system for countries that continue to bankroll ecosystem destruction.

5. UN Consensus System Gridlock

Civil society groups expressed frustration with the UN’s consensus-based rules, where a tiny handful of countries can stall or dilute binding enforcement language. Delegates and observers openly questioned whether the multilateral framework is structurally “designed to fail” when urgent ecological timelines collide with slow diplomatic horse-trading.

The Yerevan outcome is seen as a diagnostic report rather than a cure: it clearly diagnosed that the global community is failing its 2030 targets, but failed to deliver the binding statutory requirements or financial backing needed to change course.

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