Nearly 200 countries are gathered in Yerevan, Armenia for COP17 — the biodiversity summit tasked with rescuing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in 2022. The 23 targets set for 2030 are, by most measures, woefully off track. National budgets are strained, leaders are distracted by conflict and energy crises, and the institutional machinery for translating pledges into species-level outcomes remains underdeveloped. The summit's headline initiative is Cares — the Coalition of Action to Recover Endangered Species — launched jointly by Armenia and Colombia. The coalition aims to solve a triage problem: countries with hundreds of endangered species don't know where to focus. Cares will help governments identify which species are already receiving NGO or research attention and which are falling through the cracks, then connect them with experts. Reverse the Red will serve as its secretariat. Seventeen countries, including the UK, have joined so far. Separately, nine private funders including Leonardo DiCaprio's Re:wild have committed more than $500 million over five years to recover the most threatened species. The money is welcome but raises an old problem: conservation funding still flows disproportionately to large, charismatic megafauna — leopards, tigers, elephants — while fungi, algae, and amphibians are systematically underfunded. Benoit Guénard of the University of Hong Kong notes that decisions are still driven by cuteness rather than scientific priority. The Persian leopard story from Armenia's southern-central region illustrates both the promise and the limits. A previously unrecorded individual was spotted just before the summit — a genuine conservation win built on years of community-led effort with WWF to rebuild bezoar goat populations and protect habitat. But with perhaps 10 leopards in all of Armenia, the species remains at the knife's edge, and the approach doesn't scale without resources and institutional scaffolding. Scientists have warned of wildlife annihilation far exceeding natural background extinction rates, with some characterizing the current period as a mass extinction event driven by human overpopulation and overconsumption. The gap between this diagnosis and the policy response is the central tension of COP17. Governments still haven't mobilized resources at the scale required, and the summit must produce not just rhetorical commitments but implementation mechanisms with teeth. The structural challenge is familiar from climate COPs: voluntary national frameworks, no enforcement, and funding pledges that arrive late or not at all. Cares represents an attempt to build connective tissue between governments, NGOs, and researchers — a coordination layer rather than a funding mechanism. Whether it can overcome the chronic under-resourcing of biodiversity protection depends on what happens after Yerevan, not during it. The 2030 deadline is now less than five years away. If the pattern of the last four years continues — ambitious targets, sluggish implementation, funding skewed toward charismatic species — the framework will join a long list of international biodiversity agreements that produced declarations but not outcomes.
