Yerevan: Nearly 200 nations reached hard-fought agreements at the UN biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, though the outcome was accompanied by disappointment over missed opportunities to address humanity's destructive toll on nature. Delegates cheered as crucial texts were approved in overtime, but the celebrations were tempered by acrimonious debates and regret over limited progress on some of the most contentious issues.

The COP17 summit sought to revive a landmark commitment to halt and reverse the destruction of nature by 2030 after global efforts fell short. The United Nations had warned that progress was insufficient to meet the goals of the 2030 target, including protecting 30 percent of Earth's land and oceans, tackling pollution and invasive species, and boosting money for conservation.

COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan brought down the gavel on two major texts, but French Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut said the outcome was "not commensurate" with the crisis engulfing the natural world. "The progress we failed to achieve here is a series of missed opportunities to speed up our response to the loss of biodiversity," she said, stressing that "nature will not wait for the pace of our negotiations."

UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker said the summit had achieved "quite remarkable things at a moment when multilateralism is supposedly not functioning," adding that strong negotiated commitments on the most difficult subjects were never expected. Talks also focused on harmful subsidies and new sources of conservation finance, with the European Union pressing wealthy emerging economies such as China to contribute. The summit decided early Saturday that Ecuador would host the next biodiversity talks in 2028 after defeating Panama in a secret vote.

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