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COP17 outlines a pathway. Two EU projects work on what is still missing.

By Binayak Das / 11/01/2026
COP17 outlines a pathway. Two EU projects work on what is still missing.

COP17 ended with a new pathway but the finance gap remains largely open. Beyond the negotiating room, two EU projects, one on biodiversity monitoring data and one on living with wildlife, take on some of the other gaps.

Reaching the Yerevan Pathway

The UN biodiversity conference in Yerevan ended on in the early hours of Saturday 31 October, after an all-night closing plenary. Parties adopted the Yerevan Pathway at the closing plenary, a negotiated response to the first global review of progress under the Framework. The Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat says the conference adopted nearly fifty decisions in all. The Pathway sets priorities through 2030: tackling nature-harmful subsidies and incentives, increasing financial, scientific, and technical support for developing countries, aligning national budgets with the Framework, and strengthening implementation, monitoring, reporting, and review. Mainstreaming biodiversity into the policies, plans and budgets of other sectors such as agriculture, finance, energy and transport, instead of leaving them to environment ministries.

Money was the sticking point to the end. Climate Home News reported that the finance talks had reached a stalemate, held up by a proposal to widen the list of countries expected to contribute, so that emerging economies such as China, or Gulf states, could give and have it counted. Ireland’s nature minister, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, told journalists: “It has been 20 years since that list was added. Times have changed and there are new realities.” Delegates agreed to review existing funding arrangements and set criteria for a future permanent financing mechanism, but the decision steered away from expanding the donor list. Countries that want to join can “signal interest” before COP18 in Ecuador. When the Framework was adopted in 2022, governments identified a shortfall of $700 billion a year by 2030. The plan was $200 billion from all sources, with the rest coming from redirecting $500 billion in subsidies that harm nature.

There were pledges. The CBD informed that during the conference, nearly $2 billion were announced, including $560 million under the GEF-9 replenishment and its Global Biodiversity Framework Fund. Further, $500 million through the Species Recovery Alliance and over $330 million through the Value Nature Fund were pledged. Germany announced a public-private package of $300 million for the Legacy Landscapes Fund, and the China-initiated Kunming Biodiversity Fund approved nine projects worth roughly $4.5 million for developing countries. The Netherlands announced a conditional plan to invest up to $500 million over ten years in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which is a separate mechanism. Reuters, citing organisers, put the total at more than $1.8 billion. Private money has barely started: the Cali Fund, meant to collect payments from companies that profit from genetic data, had received little more than $10,000 from industry (Read more on Cali Funds).

Reactions were mixed. WWF called the review a strong signal to countries but said it must be backed by finance, and Friends of the Earth said the structural drivers of nature loss, including financial and legal systems, remain largely unaddressed. Reactions tend to reflect the findings of the State of Biodiversity Action report, released on 15 October. The report is a first collective check on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) at the halfway point to 2030, which says governments have made the least headway.

Test of COP17 is not what governments agreed in Yerevan, but what they change when they return home

Astrid Schomaker; Executive Secretary, Convention on Biological Diversity

What the State of Biodiversity Action report found

Over 80 per cent of countries have set national biodiversity targets, but fewer than half of the national targets Parties assessed are on track, according to the CBD’s launch statement.

The report draws on national reports from 129 Parties (66 per cent), national targets from 162 (83 per cent) and revised national strategies from 89 parties (45 per cent). Its verdict is plain: unless implementation speeds up rapidly, the 2030 targets will not be met. The report is careful about its limits. It cannot yet detect changes in biodiversity outcomes, and it does not rank countries.

The gaps follow a pattern. No target presents a fully positive picture, and progress is weakest where the drivers of loss are tackled.

Europe looks best prepared as per the report, though actual implementation is shaky and slow. Western European and other States, the UN grouping that includes most EU members, submitted national reports (73 per cent), targets (90 per cent), and revised strategies (70 per cent) well above the global average. Eastern European States lag, at 36, 68 and 23 per cent.

The data problem runs through everything. The share of countries reporting on individual headline indicators ranges from 7 to 78 per cent, and data are fragmented across institutions and platforms. Half of national reports give a snapshot of how much natural ecosystem there is, but fewer than 1 per cent give data over time, which is what shows whether ecosystems are shrinking, stable or recovering. The report warns that countries may lack the data and information they need to implement the Framework, not just to report on it. Parties also report missing baselines, especially for marine and coastal areas, and say subnational data are not systematically aggregated for national reporting.

Data and monitoring did make it into the outcome. The Secretariat lists limited access to technology, data, and knowledge among the main obstacles to implementation, and it lists new State of Nature Indicators and Metrics, meant to improve biodiversity monitoring and accountability, among the conference’s initiatives. COP18 will be in Ecuador in 2028, with two years left until the targets’ deadline.

Better data, shared landscapes: EU projects tackling nature recovery

Looking at data and frameworks, reminded me of two projects currently implemented by adelphi, a Berlin based thinktank on nature, climate, and sustainable development. As director with adelphi’s Biodiversity and Water programme (BiWa), I was intrigued by the report and the Yerevan COP and hence reached out to two of my colleagues who have been implementing projects that can address some of the gaps that the report and the COP 17 points to.

Neither will fix the finance gap. But between them they speak to two things the global review says are not yet in place. EBOCC, short for the EU Biodiversity Observation Coordination Centre preparatory action is about the framework: how the European Union could organise the data it needs to show whether nature is recovering. CoCo, short for Co-creating Coexistence, a Horizon Europe project is about practice-what happens on the ground when wildlife returns to pastoral landscapes. Both are EU-funded, both bring together partners from many countries, and both work on points the report names: coordination, data, and the involvement of people outside government.

EBOCC: getting the data right

EBOCC, commissioned by the European Commission and coordinated by adelphi, with the Austrian Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) as technical lead runs from 2026 to 2028. The project tests how a permanent coordination centre and monitoring framework could work, building on an earlier Europa Biodiversity Observation Network or EuropaBON proposal.

The problem it tackles is practical. One of EU’s priority response to the biodiversity crisis is the Nature Restoration Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2024/1991), which requires restoration measures on at least 20 per cent of EU land and sea by 2030. Member States already owe monitoring and reporting under the Nature Restoration Regulation, the Birds and Habitats Directives, the Water Framework Directive, and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. EBOCC tackles the key challenge of ensuring that monitoring data are comparable, reliable, and useful for tracking progress towards the EUs, and ultimately, global biodiversity targets. It aims to improve the coordination of biodiversity monitoring and reporting across the EU by developing more harmonised and operable data workflows, helping facilitate data mobilisation and reducing reporting burdens for EU Member States. The preparatory action covers six thematic areas, from freshwater and seagrass habitats to marine mammals, and supports EU Member States in rolling out the EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (EU PoMS). EBOCC was represented at COP17 in Yerevan by the Austrian Environment Agency, its technical lead.

In other words, EBOCC’s job is to turn that patchwork of national monitoring into a single, comparable picture that can be rolled up into EU and global reporting, rather than left as 27 separate national pictures.

As my colleague Johannes Stahl, EBOCC project lead from adelphi, explains: “Twenty-seven Member States are already monitoring nature, but each with their own methods and platforms. Without a shared set of Essential Biodiversity Variables and comparable methods, you cannot add those efforts up into an EU, let alone a global, picture.”

EBOCC does not replace the national systems, and it does not ask anyone to monitor more. It coordinates them around common variables and methods, so the work that is already happening finally adds up to something comparable.

CoCo: living alongside wildlife

CoCo, running until October 2027, in which adelphi research leads the work on co-creation and communication brings together 17 partners from 12 countries and works with scientists, livestock keepers, hunters and landowners to find ways for pastoralism and wildlife to share European landscapes. It aims to produce policy recommendations and tools for practitioners.

The State of the Biodiversity action shows why these matters. Only 56 per cent of Parties address managing human-wildlife conflict in their national targets, one of the least covered elements of the species target, and just 35 per cent of national targets aligned with it are on track. It is also the kind of whole-of-society action the review says is still not being fully realised. Its fifth key message says the Framework cannot be achieved without engaging actors other than national governments. But this is to some extent understandable? How do we measure human wildlife coexistence?

A case study makes it concrete. Take Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin, Germany and one of CoCo’s study areas. Wolves came back in 2007. The project’s case study, gives the key stats: 68 wolf territories and 58 packs currently present. 2,357 livestock attacks were reported between 2007 and 2024, with 7,920 animals killed, 83 per cent of them sheep. It is easy to focus on the numbers, but it is the local context that matters. Fencing and livestock guarding dogs have been put in place in Brandenburg and do reduce depredation. Conservationists say this proves it is possible to live with wolves and culling should be banned. However, pastoralists point out that even if costs are partially covered, the burden of the extra work falls on them. Livestock numbers in Brandenburg have fallen considerably in the last decades. Pastoralism is a dying art and finding labour support is highly challenging. Losing these most extensive forms of farming has other negative impacts, threatening extensive grassland and its associated biodiversity.

Katrina Marsden, my co-director colleague at adelphi’s BiWa programme and leading the CoCo project from adelphi explains “The CoCo project acknowledges the complexity and context-dependency of living with wildlife. Without working together with those most affected by wildlife presence, how can we hope to find lasting coexistence?

The project acknowledges that coexistence is not one solution, it is a compromise and one that is continually revisited, depending on local circumstance. “That is why our roadmap to coexistence will not focus only on dead sheep vs wolf populations but will look at a range of socio-economic conditions, labour availability, farming practices. We hope that this way it can support open debate if not one-size fits all solutions,” Marsden adds.

As Europe restores habitats and wildlife returns, the tensions between farming and species are likely to be tested in practice. CoCo is working on that with the people most affected.

Two projects, one point

EBOCC supplies the framework and CoCo shows what implementation looks like on the ground. The report names barriers that sit alongside finance: coordination between institutions, the involvement of people outside government, and data that cannot be compared or trusted. Both projects work on those directly, and both are built on cooperation across borders and sectors. The report’s own suggestions, such as investing in monitoring and knowledge systems, learning between peers, and bringing in rights holders and other actors, are issues that the two projects are trying to do. Whether these European pilots can inform work elsewhere depends on whether the methods and tools are shared and affordable.

Yerevan ended with the targets reaffirmed and a pathway to 2030, but the money question is still open. The Pathway’s own test is whether policies change, resources arrive and nature measurably improves, and that depends on the missing pieces falling into place: money, data, and cooperation. EBOCC and CoCo are two small answers to those gaps, and with four years left to 2030, both will have more to show over the next two years.

References

Disclosure: the author is a director at adelphi, the Berlin-based think tank that coordinates EBOCC and is a partner in CoCo, the two projects described above.

Featured Image: COP17_Yerevan_Closing_Concert/CBD COP17 Yerevan Armenia/Flickr/CC BY-NC 4.0

AdelphiCBDCoCoCOP17EBOCCEUHorizon EuropePastoralistswildlifeYerevan

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Written by

Binayak Das

Binayak Das is a Panos journalist fellow, author and founder of SixDegreesNews. Associated with adelphi Research, Germany based Research think-tank, he brings expertise in water, environment, climate, and sustainable development. His work reflects a passion for exploring diverse issues across journalism and writing.

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