Nearly 200 nations struck hard-fought agreements on Friday (October 30, 2026) at a UN biodiversity summit, but the outcome was accompanied by disappointment over missed opportunities to address humanity’s destructive toll on nature.
The COP17 summit in Armenia sought to revive a landmark commitment to halt and reverse the destruction of nature by 2030 after global efforts to meet that goal fell short. Perfect,” said COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan in Armenia as he brought down the gavel on two major texts, the final versions of which were still not available early on Saturday (October 31). “And that’s it. Tackling subsidies and other incentives that encourage activities harmful to nature — such as fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and overfishing — was one of the most politically fraught agenda items at the summit. A rare fight over science cast a pall over the summit, with a number of countries accused of undermining efforts to approve key reports in scenes that shocked even seasoned negotiators.
But the outcome was “not commensurate” with the crisis engulfing the natural world, said French Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut early on Saturday (October 31) as the summit drew to a close. “The progress we failed to achieve here is a series of missed opportunities to speed up our response to the loss of biodiversity,” Ms. Barbut said in a lengthy statement sent to AFP , stressing that “nature will not wait for the pace of our negotiations. Veteran COP observer Juliette Landry from the IDDRI think tank told AFP “there was a lot of push and pull in every direction” throughout the summit and “in that context, it’s hard to get things accepted”.
