Through the night in Yerevan, nations agreed to move faster to protect the living world

After two weeks of talks in Yerevan, Armenia, and a final session that ran through the night, governments at the COP17 biodiversity conference adopted the Yerevan Pathway on Saturday — a shared decision to speed up work on protecting nature through 2030. The deal pushes faster action on cutting subsidies that harm biodiversity, directing more finance to developing countries, and aligning national spending with nature goals. Organisers said more than $1.8 billion in fresh finance was announced during the conference. The honest caveat stayed in the text: the world is off track on almost all its nature targets, and delegates agreed the real test is what governments do before COP18 in Quito in 2028.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: policy reform