Seventeen countries join Colombia and Armenia to bring species back from the brink

At the COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Colombia and Armenia have launched something with a deadline: the Coalition of Action to Recover Endangered Species — CARES — a government coalition built to halt human-caused extinctions and pull threatened species back, with measurable progress by 2030. Seventeen founding governments signed on, from Belize, Brazil, Costa Rica and Ecuador to Fiji, Madagascar, Panama, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. The coalition targets the promise countries made in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022 — urgent action on known threatened species — and gives members access to shared species-recovery expertise so each can pick the species that need targeted help beyond habitat protection. Colombia speaks from practice: its environment minister, Fabio Alberto Arjona Hincapié, pointed to breeding and conserving the blue-billed curassow and releasing Orinoco crocodiles back into their natural habitat. 'Protecting biodiversity means more than safeguarding ecosystems,' he said. 'It also means taking direct action to prevent extinctions.'

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: institutional program