Can countries deliver on a deal to save the world’s plants and animals?

P assersby could smell the dead fish before they saw them. In August, more than 3,000 pike, roach, carp and rudd were found lifeless along the River Wensum in Norwich. Some gasped for air in their final moments, desperate for the oxygen that heatwave conditions had depleted in the water. Investigators believe that the die-off was triggered by heavy rainfall that flushed through high concentrations of pollution at a time when wildlife were already struggling. The 45-mile (70km) chalk river is one of about 250 in the country. They are a geological accident almost unique to Britain – and one of Earth’s rarest habitats. They emerge from chalk aquifers and are home to species such as freshwater shrimp, otters and stoneflies, also providing drinking water for millions of people. But just 11 have formal protection, with many ravaged by sewage pollution and overextraction. The Norfolk river is one of the few that does have legal protection, but it is in poor ecological health. “We are a world away from the crystal clear, free flowing and mineral-rich waters they could, and should be,” says Eliot Lyne, head of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. This decade was meant to signal a change in humanity’s relationship with the natural world. At the end of 2022, nearly every government on Earth committed to an ambitious deal to better protect the world’s rapidly disappearing biodiversity at a summit in Montreal, Canada. Negotiators shook hands on targets that included protecting 30% of the planet for nature, restoring nearly a third of the planet’s most degraded ecosystems, and reforming at least $500bn (£375bn) of environmentally harmful subsidies. Some scientists say that we are living through the largest loss of life since the time of the dinosaurs, putting a million species at risk of extinction. This time, humanity is the meteor. The Montreal agreement was the response. View image in fullscreen The leadership of the COP15 biodiversity conference celebrates passing the deal setting this decade’s global targets in Montreal, Canada, December 2022. Photograph: IISD But four years later, governments look almost certain to miss nearly all of the deal’s targets – potentially continuing the record of never having met a single UN target on nature since the biodiversity convention was created at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The UK, one of the loudest voices demanding ambition in Montreal, is on track to meet just three of the 23 targets by the end of the decade. This week, countries gather at Cop17 in Yerevan, Armenia, to decide what to do next. On the eve of the summit, at the launch of a report showing just how far off track the world is on meeting those commitments, António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, warned that lack of progress means “the war on nature has not ended” and that “nature will not survive on good intentions”. Following this, in an address to leaders at an event in Armenia , Guterres once again emphasised the importance of action on subsidies in particular. “Subsidising fossil fuels is subsidising suicide,” Guterres said. “They are boiling our planet and are the scourge of biodiversity. I urge governments everywhere to end these handouts once and for all, and to use the savings for people and planet instead.” “There’s a massive gap between countries agreeing to do something and actually doing it,” says Zac Goldsmith, former UK government minister when the deal was reached. “That’s where we are today.” British conservationists point to a growing gap between government rhetoric and action. “The UK is back on the international stage on nature,” then environment secretary Steve Reed declared while standing under the skeleton of a blue whale at the Natural History Museum in the first few months of the Starmer government. Since then, the government has weakened rules on biodiversity net gain in England, slashed tens of millions of pounds of funding for rainforest protection schemes as part of aid cuts, and rejected an outright ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas. No new sites of special scientific interest have been designated by Natural England to protect rare wildlife and habitats since 2023. View image in fullscreen Yereven, Armenia, where countries will gather to review progress on nature goals, at Cop17 this month. Photograph: Cop17 Yereven “For us to go around the world telling other countries that they must achieve these targets without us having a plan how to deliver them at home is a form of neocolonialism,” says Craig Bennett, head of The Wildlife Trusts. “We’ve got to pull our socks up and get serious about delivery at home. We are the nation of Sir David Attenborough. We are animal and nature lovers.” A UK government spokesperson said it has backed a nature recovery and climate resilience with £7bn of funding, and implemented new powers to tackle water pollution, fund species recovery and support international conservation work. The UK has also reinstated its climate aid commitments, apparently abandoned earlier this year , pledging around £6bn of international climate finance from the aid budget over the next three financial years, with around a quarter expected to be spent on nature. Jonathan Hall, managing director of Conservation International UK, told the Guardian: “Re-instating the ditched goal for international nature funding as part of UK climate aid is smart politics, given UK public support, and a smart investment in our global security and resilience in the face of ecosystem collapse. This very welcome re-commitment now needs to be accompanied with increased transparency so we can ensure this approximately £1.5bn is disbursed as impactfully as possible.” But the urgency of the warnings has not changed. Earlier this year, a report by intelligence chiefs warned that ecological collapse is a national security risk , threatening the country with food shortages, economic strife and global disorder. But nature has been unable to escape the swirling global current of populist culture wars . In the Netherlands, efforts by the EU, in 2019, to crack down on nitrogen pollution to protect vulnerable ecosystems sparked nationwide farmer protests . While the discontent predates this decade’s biodiversity targets, the nature restoration law , the EU’s flagship package of laws resulting from the deal, also became embroiled in a bitter disagreement with the rightwing bloc in the European parliament, who tried to block the regulations due to the impact on agriculture. It was eventually passed, but only after it was substantially watered down . skip past newsletter promotion Free newsletter | Weekly Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential Enter your email Sign up after newsletter promotion View image in fullscreen Farmers protest against an EU crackdown on nitrogen pollution in The Hague, the Netherlands, October 2019. Photograph: Vincent Jannink/EPA “In the Netherlands, they tried really hard and you saw this huge backlash. It’s an extremely sensitive issue politically,” says Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s former environment minister, who helped guide the 2022 negotiations alongside China’s environment minister, Huang Runqiu. “Governments are not always the best at communicating these complex policy pieces. It is easy for a critic to come up with a totally meaningless slogan that gets picked up on social media,” he says. The second presidency of Donald Trump has also been catastrophic for the conservation sector. Hundreds of projects had previously received support from Washington DC – from stopping illegal fishing in the Galápagos islands to backing the restoration of Gorongosa national park in Mozambique after the civil war – but Trump’s brutal cuts to USAID and other government agencies have meant funding evaporated overnight for many schemes. View image in fullscreen USAID-supported Ugandan wildlife crime investigators at work in 2016. Photograph: Ashley Netherton/USAID Many European nations have followed suit – despite signing up to a target to increase biodiversity finance to $30bn a year by the end of the decade. The UK has cut back funding for the Darwin Initiative , removing eligibility for at least 89 countries earlier this year. Efforts to get the private sector to help have struggled; a new fund to get companies that use digital forms of biodiversity for commercial discoveries, which proponents had hoped would raise hundreds of millions each year, has so far raised just $6,000. It is not a universally gloomy picture. A majority of countries have responded to significant parts of the agreement. One estimate shows that countries could come close to meeting the land portion of the 30x30 target, and the deal has seen the formalisation of more Indigenous territories in many countries. Even bigger protected areas could come: places such as French Polynesia have established huge new marine parks. Countries such as Kazakhstan have used the agreement to drive a major rewilding effort, bringing back the Caspian tiger . But the gap between what the science demands to avert ecological crisis and the current pace of change remains huge – and an urgent task for negotiators in Armenia. View image in fullscreen A tiger is released into Kazakhstan’s wilderness as part of a repopulation programme. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images “Protection targets are falling short, promised national plans have yet to materialise, and committed finance is not reaching where it is needed. This is increasingly a shared dynamic across environmental processes: making commitments is the easy part; delivering on them is much harder,” said Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Sustainable change will only happen when countries internalise the urgency to act and translate commitments into domestic action. More than halfway through this decade, most countries are still moving far too slowly.” Find more age of extinction coverage here , and follow biodiversity reporters Rebecca Ratcliffe , Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on the app for all the latest news and features. The Guardian’s climate forum 2026 On Tuesday, October 20, join Zoe Williams, and our panel of experts—including Professor Andy Haines, Katie White MP, Asad Rehman, Shruti Suresh Gareth Thomas and Amy Fairman for a hopeful and solutions-focused evening. 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