Armenia opened its doors to the world’s largest conservation gathering this week, as heads of state and senior UN officials arrived in the capital for the COP17 biodiversity summit, with the main negotiating sessions due to run from October 19 to 30.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan hosted UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian for talks ahead of the conference. The discussions covered the prospects for peace with neighboring Azerbaijan as well as the need for urgent action to protect the natural world.
The meetings came as a newly launched report, State of Biodiversity Action, took stock of how countries are doing on the promises they made four years ago. The report finds some achievements but also major gaps in delivering the 23 targets of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
The shortfalls are most pronounced in three areas: restoring damaged ecosystems, mobilizing the financing needed to protect nature, and reforming subsidies that continue to encourage environmental harm.
Those three issues are likely to dominate the negotiations. Delegates will face pressure to show that the framework, often described as a “Paris Agreement for nature,” can be turned from commitments on paper into measurable results.
Demonstrators gathered outside the venue to argue that nature protection cannot be separated from human rights. Protesters raised the displacement of people from Nagorno-Karabakh and warned of the environmental and community risks posed by mining, presenting both as part of a broader question of who bears the cost when land and resources are contested.
Behind the scenes, more than 350 UN Volunteers are supporting the event. It is the first time Armenia has hosted the biodiversity conference, a milestone for a small, landlocked country that has used the occasion to showcase its landscapes and its diplomatic ambitions.
Hosting the summit also gives Yerevan a platform at a delicate moment in the region. Pashinyan’s meetings with Guterres and Pezeshkian underscore how closely environmental diplomacy and regional security are now intertwined, with the South Caucasus attempting to move toward a lasting settlement while the global community weighs how to halt the decline of species and habitats.
As the formal sessions approach, the central question for negotiators is whether the gaps identified in the new report can be closed in the years remaining before the framework’s 2030 deadline.
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