Four years since countries agreed in Montreal to protect and conserve at least 30% of the planet’s nature by the end of the decade, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity convening for their bi-annual meeting in Yerevan, Armenia, next week do so against a backdrop of patchy progress.

According to the Campaign for Nature’s 30x30 Global Assessment, government commitments could take the amount of land and inland waters protected to 27% by the end of the decade, from 20% today, with 50 countries having already met the 30% target set in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

The picture at sea, however, is far less encouraging. A companion report by Together for the Ocean shows that, at the half-way point to delivering the GBF, just 10% of the world’s oceans are protected, with existing commitments only likely to raise this to around 12% by 2030.

WWF’s biennial Living Planet Report showed the same mixed picture for wildlife. On the positive side, populations of some of the world’s most iconic animals are recovering, with tiger numbers up by over 70% since 2010, and bluefin tuna no longer listed as a species of major concern.

Nevertheless, biodiversity indicators point to a vast decline on a global scale, with a 73% drop in the average size of monitored wildlife populations over a 52-year period. It’s a level of collapse that can’t be reversed by conservation measures alone, the report says.

Key contributors include habitat loss, degradation and issues such as overexploitation, climate change, pollution and invasive species. But all are driven by broader systemic failures across the food, energy and finance systems.

The finance gap for nature is expected to top the COP17 agenda in Yerevan. Currently, $2.6 trillion a year of public money – close to 2.5% of global GDP – is given to practices that deplete soils, pollute watercourses and degrade ecosystems. According to the UNEP, around 87% of agricultural support is channelled towards synthetic fertilisers, and the creation of monocultures.

Under Target 18 of the GBF, 196 countries committed to reduce these nature-harming incentives by at least $500 billion annually by 2030, yet so far, only 5% have set comprehensive national targets.

In an open letter organised by Business for Nature and the Finance for Biodiversity Foundation, over 130 businesses and financial institutions, representing $4.7 trillion in assets under management, call on governments to drive forward with incentive reform at COP17.

Signatories include BNP Paribas Asset Management, Danone and Orsted, who write that in their current state, financial incentives distort markets by making high-impact products artificially cheap, leaving companies with more sustainable practices carrying a cost burden.

Realigning public spending, in collaboration with producers, local communities and Indigenous peoples, will ensure that sustainable, resilient production becomes the norm, and the most competitive choice for all businesses.

Eva Zabey, chief executive at Business for Nature, said in an interview that incentive reform is one of the most powerful economic levers available to de-risk global supply chains and unlock private investment, as it doesn’t require governments to find new money. “It’s about governments being smart about how they allocate resources… it’s about reusing that money to build and invest in resilience.”Incentive reform also means using existing financial mechanisms, rather than creating new ones, so can be scaled more quickly.

It’s a point picked up by Gill Einhorn, director of the Forest Future Alliance at the World Economic Forum, which brings together capital providers who fund forest conservation and stewardship. “By tweaking existing financial instruments we can unlock a scale of financing for conservation and restoration that we haven’t seen before,” she says.

We don’t have time to wait for pilot projects to scale, Einhorn adds, so “drawing on existing mechanisms is the solution”.

She cites Brazil’s sustainable forestry management company BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group. The company, which had a fund to raise finance for FSC-certified wood, recently lauched a similar fund where 50% is allocated to certified wood, while 50% aims to conserve, restore and reforest approximately 660,000 acres of degraded landscapes in Latin America.

The fund exceeded all expectations, she says, and closed at $1.24 billion, the same size as the original fund. "So they tweaked an existing instrument, with huge dividends for nature." She also points to Natural Capital, a conservation investment and management group with a mission to protect some of Africa’s wildest areas, including projects that stretch across 500,000 hectares.

Rather than just focussing on one area such as carbon or biodiversity credits, she explains, they are introducing opportunities to invest in clean energy and eco-tourism, with plans to include regenerative agriculture, too. This layering approach produces a product that is a safer, more varied investment and “looks a lot more financially interesting”, she says.

Another finance vehicle set to fall under the spotlight in Armenia is the Cali Fund. Named after the Colombian city that hosted COP16 two years ago, it was launched in 2025 as a way to allow companies that commercially benefit from digital sequence information (DSI) to reinvest in the natural systems and communities their products rely on.

It was hoped that the fund would lead to billions of dollars of capitalisation, but a general lack of awareness means the current figure stands at just $6,000.

The fund came about after businesses called for a simpler, multilateral mechanism, explains Thomas Pickford, UK policy and external affairs associate at The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

“There has been confusion about what the fund actually stands for,” he says, with companies unsure of the scope of the voluntary fund, and who should pay in.

There are issues around transparency too, which are putting businesses off, he explains. At COP16 it was agreed that 50% of the fund would go to local communities and indigenous people, with the rest distributed across countries based on their biodiversity richness. But companies need assurances about how governments will spend this money, he says.

“They're responsible for where that money goes… (and) they don't want to be held liable for the misuse of any funds or if those funds cause any damages,” he says.

He hopes that COP17 will flesh out the details so “that it’s understandable, it’s predictable and it’s practical to implement”.

There’s hope too, that the two weeks of talks in Armenia will lead to a Yerevan Pathway, and a roadmap for the next four years of implementing the GBF.

Pickford is optimistic it can succeed. “The solutions are out there and the finance is out there,” he says. “(With) the right policies, the right market frameworks, the right incentives… (we can) really accelerate the progress towards the targets.”