The world has a new plan to save nature, but it still needs the money

Catherine Weller, global policy director at the campaign group Fauna & Flora, said the Yerevan agreement was welcome but also noted that funding fell far short of a pledge that had been a key part of the 2022 deal. “In a world of trillionaires, we can certainly afford to spend $200 billion a year on protecting and restoring the very thing keeping us all alive: nature,” she said.

Conference organizers said governments, philanthropists, and businesses had announced close to $2 billion in new financial commitments to coincide with the Armenian gathering.

This included a commitment by the Netherlands to contribute $500 million to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a Brazilian initiative to pay countries to keep their forests standing. The pledge was announced in the Dutch parliament the day after Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected as president, to the relief of many attending the biodiversity summit.

After the close of the conference, Carina Pimenta, Brazil’s national secretary for bioeconomy, highlighted Lula’s record of protecting the Amazon rainforest and spoke of hope. “At a time of growing global uncertainty, the Yerevan Declaration sends a powerful message: world leaders recognise that protecting biodiversity is essential to food security, livelihoods, and economic resilience,” she said.

A growing number of countries to have drawn up national diversity plans, and the new pledge to the Brazilian fund, were “reasons for cautious optimism,” said Brian O’Donnell, director at Campaign for Nature.

But international funding for protected and conserved areas has fallen in a number of countries over years of disruption from war and high energy prices, with a 27 percent decline in environmental funding for the 2026-30 period.

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