‘Bunch of baloney’: calls grow for Cop summit reforms as countries on track to fail nature targets

Critics are calling for major reforms to UN biodiversity summits after Cop17 ended with countries still off track on nearly all their nature targets. They say the consensus-based process can let individual governments block progress, while repeated promises have yet to halt the destruction of the natural world.

At the Yerevan summit, governments reaffirmed existing targets, including protecting 30% of the planet and increasing biodiversity finance to $30bn a year by 2030. The UK is on course to meet only three of 23 targets; a proposed fund expected to raise £1bn annually has so far received just over $10,000, and decisions on it were postponed until the next summit in Ecuador in two years.