In August, more than 3,000 fish died in the River Wensum in Norwich — a chalk river, one of Earth's rarest habitats, and one of the few in Britain with formal legal protection. The die-off was triggered by pollution flushed through by heavy rainfall during a heatwave. The river is in poor ecological health despite its protected status. It is a microcosm of the global biodiversity crisis: legal protection on paper, degradation in practice. The 2022 Montreal biodiversity deal was meant to reverse this trajectory. Nearly every government committed to protecting 30% of the planet for nature, restoring a third of the most degraded ecosystems, and reforming at least $500bn in environmentally harmful subsidies. Scientists have warned that a million species face extinction — the largest loss of life since the dinosaurs. The deal was supposed to be the collective response. Four years on, governments look almost certain to miss nearly all of the deal's 23 targets, continuing a record of never having met a single UN biodiversity target since the convention was created at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The UK, one of the loudest voices demanding ambition in Montreal, is on track to meet just three of 23 targets. Countries are gathering at Cop17 in Yerevan, Armenia, this week to assess the damage. UN Secretary General António Guterres warned that "nature will not survive on good intentions" and called specifically for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, which he called "subsidising suicide." The UK exemplifies the gap between rhetoric and action. Environment secretary Steve Reed declared "the UK is back on the international stage on nature" early in the Starmer government's tenure. Since then, the government has weakened biodiversity net gain rules in England, slashed tens of millions in rainforest protection funding through aid cuts, rejected an outright ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas, and designated no new sites of special scientific interest since 2023. Craig Bennett of The Wildlife Trusts called the dynamic "a form of neocolonialism" — telling other countries to meet targets without having a domestic delivery plan. The government points to £7bn in nature recovery funding and reinstated climate aid commitments of around £6bn over three years, with roughly £1.5bn earmarked for nature. The Trump administration's return has been catastrophic for global conservation finance. Hundreds of projects previously funded by Washington — from anti-illegal-fishing operations in the Galápagos to Gorongosa national park restoration in Mozambique — lost funding overnight through USAID and agency cuts. European nations have followed suit despite committing to increase biodiversity finance to $30bn annually by decade's end. A new fund to capture commercial value from digital biodiversity data, which proponents hoped would raise hundreds of millions per year, has raised exactly $6,000. The UK cut Darwin Initiative eligibility for at least 89 countries. The political headwinds are real. In the Netherlands, EU efforts to crack down on nitrogen pollution to protect ecosystems sparked nationwide farmer protests. The EU's nature restoration law, its flagship biodiversity legislation, was substantially watered down after a bitter fight with the European parliament's rightwing bloc. Canada's former environment minister Steven Guilbeault, who co-guided the Montreal negotiations, acknowledged that governments struggle to communicate complex policy and that critics easily weaponize simple slogans on social media. There are fragments of progress. Countries could come close to meeting the land portion of the 30x30 target. French Polynesia has established major new marine parks. Kazakhstan has used the agreement to drive rewilding, bringing back the Caspian tiger. More Indigenous territories have been formalized. But Li Shuo of the Asia Society Policy Institute captures the structural problem precisely: "Making commitments is the easy part; delivering on them is much harder." More than halfway through the decade, most countries are still moving far too slowly, and the mechanisms to force compliance remain absent.
