YEREVAN, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Four years after the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, its first global progress report has found uneven progress toward the 2030 targets, with the biggest gaps in efforts to address the drivers of biodiversity loss.
The State of Biodiversity Action report, released by the United Nations on Thursday, will inform the first global review of collective progress under the framework at the upcoming 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in the Armenian capital.
With the conference opening on Oct. 19, the challenge is to turn the review's findings into concrete action.
UNEVEN PROGRESS
Countries have taken action across all 23 targets of the framework for 2030, but none presents an entirely positive picture, according to the report. Unless collective implementation accelerates, the 2030 targets and mission will not be achieved.
The report identifies two gaps: national targets do not fully reflect the scope and ambition of global commitments, and implementation falls short even of those less ambitious targets.
Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the CBD, said in August that fewer than half of the national targets assessed by parties and aligned with the framework were on track. The largest gaps concerned resource mobilization, harmful subsidy reform, business impacts and the transition to sustainable consumption.
Schomaker has noted promising conservation efforts, alongside slow progress on resource mobilization, harmful subsidy reform and inclusive governance.
The framework calls for reducing incentives harmful to biodiversity, including subsidies, by at least 500 billion U.S. dollars annually by 2030.
Yet an analysis by the Britain-based website Carbon Brief found that only about 5 percent of countries had set quantitative targets for subsidy reductions. Some countries reported that reform faced obstacles from vested interests and political resistance.
ECONOMIC OBSTACLES
A recent report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) points to tightening public finances and immediate pressures over food and energy security as reasons why some countries have shown insufficient political will for biodiversity protection.
The problem becomes more acute when reforms affect powerful interest groups or impose immediate costs on certain sectors, while conservation benefits are shared across society and take longer to emerge.
International financing presents another challenge. Under the framework, international biodiversity finance from developed countries and other contributors to developing countries was to reach at least 20 billion dollars annually by 2025, increasing to at least 30 billion dollars by 2030.
However, the State of Biodiversity Action report shows that reported international public finance totaled only 17.7 billion dollars between 2020 and 2023, averaging about 4.4 billion dollars a year.
An assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warns that delaying action could double the costs and increase the risk of irreversible losses, including species extinctions. Current economic models are also exacerbating biodiversity loss, climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity and health risks, with unaccounted-for costs estimated at 10 trillion to 25 trillion dollars annually.
Within and between countries, the central tension is who should bear the immediate costs of protecting nature and when. The longer action is delayed, the greater the overall costs.
TURNING REVIEW INTO ACTION
The key test for COP17 is whether the review can provide clear guidance for further action, according to the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, a French think tank.
Under the convention's procedures, the global review materials will be submitted to COP17, where parties will examine implementation gaps and consider follow-up action.
Observers say three questions will be central to the conference.
First, what signals will its decisions send? Harmful subsidy reform and the integration of biodiversity into economic decision-making are among the areas lagging most. A general call to accelerate action would carry different weight from specific measures addressing these obstacles.
Second, how will funding be secured and managed? Financing is a major weakness identified by the review and an important measure by which developing countries will judge the conference's outcome. The WWF has called on COP17 to deliver results rather than further promises, including a credible path toward mobilizing at least 30 billion dollars annually in international biodiversity finance by 2030.
Third, how will supporting measures be implemented? At the Kunming Dialogue on the framework's implementation in September, participants broadly agreed that finance, capacity-building and technology were equally important. They also noted that support remained insufficient, while reliance on short-term funding hampered long-term planning and implementation.
Despite the gaps exposed by the report, Schomaker has stressed that the 2030 targets remain achievable, provided major changes are made.
COP17 will need to address who bears the costs of protecting nature and how to overcome resistance to reforms that bring short-term difficulties but long-term benefits. Its decisions will help determine whether the framework remains a set of commitments on paper or is translated into national budgets, subsidies and investment. ■
