The UN biodiversity conference, COP17, closed in Yerevan on 31 October after an all-night final plenary. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted nearly 50 decisions and the Yerevan Pathway, which sets priorities for action through 2030. It responds to the first global assessment of collective progress under the Kunming-Montreal framework, which found the world “off track to meet the Framework’s 23 targets by 2030”.
Announcements included nearly US$2bn of new funding, according to the convention’s secretariat, among them US$560m under the GEF-9 replenishment and its Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, US$500m through the Species Recovery Alliance and more than US$330m through the Value Nature Fund, which aims to mobilise private capital. These are pledges, and they are modest against the framework’s target of at least US$200bn a year by 2030. Carbon Brief notes that developed countries failed to meet their commitment to raise at least US$20bn a year by 2025.
The money question moves to 2028
The hardest fight was over who pays. The convention’s list of developed-country contributors was last amended in 2006. Under the adopted text, as Carbon Brief reports it, other countries can “signal interest” in joining through bilateral, confidential consultations before COP18, and none will be added without first being invited and confidentially consulted. The decision steers clear of criteria for expanding the list. It establishes a financial mechanism for nature funding after 2030 under the governance of the COP, but defers whether that means a new fund. COP18 will be held in Quito, Ecuador, in 2028.
Two other outcomes bear directly on investors. At Peru’s request, Carbon Brief reports, countries called for a study to examine whether biodiversity credits and offsets “generate additionality in biodiversity conservation”. And parties agreed the rules of operation for the permanent body for Indigenous peoples and local communities that COP16 agreed to create. Private money remains scarce. Pledges to the Cali Fund, where indicative contributions are 0.1% of revenue or 1% of profits, totalled just US$10,565 by the end of the talks.
Why nature risk is reaching the balance sheet
The financial case was made in Yerevan as the final week began. At the conference’s Finance and Biodiversity Day on 26 October, Frank Elderson, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, said ECB analysis shows that “72% of companies in the euro area depend on at least one ecosystem service”, and that 75% of euro-area corporate lending goes to companies highly dependent on at least one. Elderson cited research suggesting a 1-in-100-year drought could put up to 24% of euro-area output at risk. “In economic terms, we have been consuming our capital and calling it income,” Elderson said.
For a universal owner, that dependence runs through the whole portfolio and cannot be diversified away. It reaches fixed income through bank loan books that supervisors are now measuring. It reaches real assets in farming, forestry, water and mining, where a permanent body gives Indigenous peoples a direct voice. It reaches credit-based nature strategies, whose additionality governments have now asked to have studied. And the deferral on donors suggests governments will not soon supply the public first-loss capital that blended structures rely on. Subsidy reform may matter most: governments spend as much as US$1.8trn a year on subsidies and incentives that may harm nature, Carbon Brief notes, and the framework aims to cut them by at least US$500bn a year by 2030.
The caveats are real. The Yerevan decisions are addressed to governments, not companies, and Elderson said central banks will remain “climate and nature policy takers”. Dependence on an ecosystem service is not the same as a loss, and the drought figure describes a tail event, not a forecast.
What to watch
Countries that want to join the donor list can signal interest before COP18 in Quito in 2028, when the form of the post-2030 financial mechanism is also due to be settled. Before then, intersessional talks on the Cali Fund continue, and the terms and timing of the credits study will show how seriously governments intend to police nature markets. The nearer test is fiscal: whether national budgets begin to reflect the US$500bn subsidy-reform target.
Sources
- UN Biodiversity Conference charts Yerevan Pathway to accelerate global action for nature, Convention on Biological Diversity, 31 October 2026
- COP17: Key outcomes agreed at the UN biodiversity conference in Yerevan, Carbon Brief, 31 October 2026
- Taking action for nature – investing in economic resilience and prosperity, European Central Bank, 26 October 2026