Almost four years ago, 196 nations reached a 23-target agreement in Montreal to halt ecosystem destruction — including protecting 30% of the planet, restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems, and tackling $500 billion in environmentally harmful subsidies. It was the most ambitious biodiversity deal ever signed. The US and the Vatican were the only holdouts. The scorecard ahead of Cop17 in Yerevan, Armenia, is bleak. Preparatory documents show no target with a fully positive assessment. The traffic-light rating system used to track national progress is dominated by yellow, orange, and red. The pre-Cop17 report states plainly: "Unless collective implementation accelerates rapidly, the 2030 targets and mission will not be achieved." The damage is not evenly distributed. The US, which provided an average of 12.1% of global biodiversity funding between 2015 and 2022 according to the OECD, has functionally withdrawn. The Trump administration's clampdown on climate and development spending gutted USAID and partner organizations, hitting anti-poaching operations in East Africa and illegal fishing enforcement in the Galápagos. This is not a marginal funding cut — it is the removal of the single largest bilateral conservation funder. Some governments have tried. Kazakhstan used the agreement to drive a major rewilding effort including the return of the Caspian tiger. The EU attempted to codify the targets through the nature restoration law, but that effort was consumed by culture-war politics before it could gain traction. These are real but isolated bright spots against a backdrop of systemic retreat. The deeper structural problem is the erosion of multilateral institutions. The UN's convening power has weakened. Tech billionaires and AI architects now wield more practical influence than many nation-states. Trump's second term has accelerated a shift toward might-is-right geopolitics that is fundamentally hostile to the cooperative architecture that agreements like this require. Zac Goldsmith, who was UK environment minister during the Cop15 deal, captures the gap precisely: "There's a massive gap between countries agreeing to do something and actually doing it. That's where we are today." Cop17 will be a reckoning with this gap — and an attempt to pick up pieces from four years of inaction. The original Montreal deal was itself a compromise — "barely matched what the science tells us we need to do," as the article notes. The world negotiated the minimum viable plan and then failed to execute even that. The 2030 targets are now functionally out of reach, which places the 2050 vision of living in harmony with nature in jeopardy. The question at Yerevan is whether governments will acknowledge this honestly or continue performing commitment they cannot deliver.
