Biodiversity COP17 in Yerevan, Armenia, is proceeding with the subdued energy of a process that knows it is failing. Environment ministers from around the world have arrived to confront the fact that they are on track to miss nearly all the biodiversity targets agreed at COP15 four years ago. The record is unblemished in the worst possible way: no generation of biodiversity targets has ever been met. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, acknowledged the gap between ambition and delivery in a side meeting on Wednesday. "The process is delivering but it's going too slowly," she said, relaying UN Secretary-General António Guterres's message to the summit: "Thank you. Good. Do more, but faster, because we are not where we want to be." The organisation is working with governments to streamline the sprawling architecture of environmental agreements. The structural problem is clear. Since the 1970s, separate conventions have been established for illegal wildlife trade, migratory species, broader biodiversity, and wetlands. Each arrived at the right moment, but the cumulative effect is a plethora of overlapping bodies with programmatic duplication that Andersen calls "energy-sapping." She suggested governments should begin by addressing the easy wins — convention overlap — before tackling the harder question of whether the entire apparatus needs restructuring. Implementation remains the fatal weakness. Painfully negotiated agreements contain no mechanisms to meaningfully highlight which countries are falling behind or punish non-compliance. Enforcement is entirely voluntary, left to national governments whose domestic political incentives rarely align with 10-year biodiversity timelines. During climate COP29 in Azerbaijan in 2024, leading policy experts described the summit process as "no longer fit for purpose" and called for a shift from negotiation to implementation. The geopolitical backdrop offers thin encouragement. Lula's consolidation of power in Brazil may sustain low deforestation rates in the Amazon. Serbia's new Student List government could address the country's environmental record. But these wins are products of national politics, not the multilateral system — which underscores the reformers' point about where actual change happens. By Friday, governments are scheduled to sign off on an action plan to recover lost ground on this decade's biodiversity targets. Few in Yerevan expect major commitments. The more consequential question is whether the failure triggers structural reform of the COP process itself — or whether the system continues producing agreements it has no mechanism to enforce, consuming diplomatic energy while biodiversity loss accelerates. The pattern is self-reinforcing: weak enforcement produces missed targets, missed targets produce calls for reform, calls for reform are absorbed into the next round of negotiations. Without a circuit-breaker — whether binding compliance mechanisms, conditional hosting criteria, or convention consolidation — the multilateral biodiversity regime risks becoming a permanent performative exercise.
