Nearly two weeks of negotiations in Yerevan ended early on Saturday morning with countries agreeing the key parts of a new plan to protect nature — and conceding, in the same document, that they are falling behind the targets they set four years ago.

"And that's it. Perfect," the meeting president, Hambardzum Matevosyan, said as the biodiversity summit, known as Cop17, closed hours after talks were due to finish.

The agreement recommits governments to the Global Biodiversity Framework signed in 2022, which contained 24 targets, including putting 30% of the world's land and seas into protection by the end of the decade. According to the UN this week, the world is on track to achieve just one of those two dozen targets.

The stakes are not abstract. Scientists say the planet is in a sixth mass extinction event, with species disappearing at roughly 100 times the natural rate because of human activity.

A deal, but not a breakthrough

"While not particularly exciting or detailed, it's good news that countries could reach agreement," said Catherine Weller of the environmental charity Fauna & Flora. "We cannot just plod on to 2030 without a course correction; nature is critical to all life on Earth: to our economies, to our wellbeing."

Craig Bennett, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, put it more starkly. "We are still seeing an appalling loss, threatening the collapse of ecosystems globally. We run out of words really about how serious this is," he told BBC News. He added that "the better news is there are so many examples worldwide about how... to turn things around".

There are some. Countries have put 623 million acres (252m hectares) of degraded land into protection, an area bigger than Greenland, and last month the WWF praised conservation work that had helped species including elephants, green sea turtles and tigers recover.

The money is the sticking point

Governments have recognised that finance is the main barrier. In 2022 they agreed to put $30bn towards nature recovery by the end of the decade and to mobilise a further $170bn from private sources. But many nations have since redirected international aid towards defence budgets and to deal with repeated energy shocks, and the UN says pledges are not arriving at the rate required.

At this meeting, more than $1bn was pledged, with half of that coming from philanthropists including Leonardo DiCaprio's Re:wild organisation.

Anna Ducros, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development who was in Yerevan, said there had been some progress on committing to reduce subsidies for industries that harm nature. "A concrete example is that governments subsidise large-scale fishing that is especially harmful for nature — for example, trawling," she said. "Right now, we have the situation where governments are paying twice."

A separate funding pot, the Cali Fund, was set up for companies that profit from genetic material found in nature. It was estimated that up to $3.6bn could be raised annually; at the start of the meeting just $10,000 had been pledged. Little progress was made, and Bennett acknowledged that its voluntary nature makes it hard to put pressure on companies.

Calls to change the summits themselves

The UK's position illustrates the wider problem: it is set to meet just three of the 23 targets it is assessed against, and critics say the summit system lets a single government block progress. Calls are growing for reforms to how the Cop meetings work, including how decisions are taken and how governments are held to them.

Calls to change the summits themselves

The Guardian reported that Cop17 concluded with critics saying the system allows "one idiot" to stall progress, and that governments are likely on track to continue a record of never having met a target in the 34-year history of the convention.

The measures signed off included a commitment to ramp up action on existing targets and a reaffirmation of the goal to increase biodiversity finance to $30bn a year by the end of the decade. The targets themselves are ambitious: protecting 30% of the planet for nature, restoring nearly a third of Earth's degraded ecosystems, and reforming $500bn of environmentally damaging subsidies.

The UK is set to meet just three of the 23 targets it is assessed against. Environment ministers, activists and officials used the conference to appeal for changes to how the summits work, so that governments follow through on the drivers of biodiversity loss rather than returning to the same arguments every two years.

What happens next

The agreement keeps the process alive and gives governments a framework to report against, but it does not close the finance gap or bind countries to new action. The next test is whether the pledges made in Yerevan turn into money and policy before the decade's targets fall due.

The summit also lands in a crowded week of international bargaining, with Canada and the EU building a new alliance, reparations pressure at the Commonwealth summit, and tariff fights reshaping trade. Nature, on this evidence, is still being negotiated in the gaps between those bigger arguments.