How does the math work here? The first global review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is due in Yerevan from October 19 to 30, and the balance sheet is already taking shape: the targets column reads better than the means column. Before the review opens, China is convening a high-level Kunming Dialogue in Kunming from September 7 to 9, with the COP16 and COP17 presidencies engaged on the same agenda. Read the numbers the right way round, and the review is not a report card on nature — it is a report card on budgets.
The venue says something by itself. COP17 will be held in Armenia’s capital, the first time the biodiversity process has met in the South Caucasus, and the expectations are big: up to 30,000 participants across 196 parties. A review of this scale is new. The framework was adopted at COP15 in Montreal, and this is the first occasion on which the collective progress of all parties is being examined under it, including the headline 30 by 30 target that has anchored the framework in public attention since the day it was signed.
The review’s foundation is the State of Biodiversity Action report, drafted over three weeks of negotiation in Nairobi under the two preparatory bodies, SBSTTA-28 and SBI-7. The draft’s own verdict is the part that matters most: progress on protection targets is relatively good, but the means of implementation — resource mobilization, redirecting harmful subsidies, inclusive governance — is lagging behind. That is a split verdict, and splits are where the real information lives.
What counts as “progress on protection targets” is worth unpacking before the numbers are quoted. The framework’s targets are largely territorial and spatial in shape — areas protected, areas under management, 30 by 30 being the headline line — and territorial targets are the easiest column to move on paper. A boundary change or a listing decision can register progress without changing what happens on the ground; the harder test is whether the protected area has staff, patrols, budget and a management plan. The Nairobi draft’s own framing, with protection ahead and means behind, is an implicit admission that the easy column has moved faster than the expensive one.
Let me think about what that split means in ledger terms. Protection targets are the asset side of the statement: protected areas, species measures, the visible conservation infrastructure. Means of implementation are the funding side: where the money comes from, what gets redirected, who gets a seat in the decisions. An asset side that grows faster than its funding is not an achievement; it is a liability in disguise, because a protected area without an operating budget becomes a paper park — green on the map, empty in practice.
The harmful subsidy line is the one to watch hardest. The framework committed parties to redirect subsidies that harm biodiversity, and the Nairobi draft says progress there is slow. That is the classic balance-sheet tell: a company that reports asset growth while the cash flow line goes sideways is a company being carried by accounting rather than by operations. In biodiversity terms, the accounting is the area map; the operations are the flows that keep the area alive.
The third lagging line, inclusive governance, is the least flashy and in some ways the most consequential. The framework committed parties not just to outcomes but to who sits at the table deciding them — indigenous communities, local stakeholders, subnational governments — and the Nairobi draft lists it among the slow-moving means. That matters for a commercial reason as much as a moral one: governance gaps are where implementation funds leak. A conservation program that does not carry local consent tends to spend its budget defending its decisions instead of executing them, and a review that flags this line is flagging an efficiency problem, not just a fairness one.
I started this piece assuming the review would be a clean scorecard, and I had to adjust my reading. A global framework review is never a clean scorecard; it is a negotiation dressed as an evaluation. What gets reported as progress is itself a negotiated product — which numbers are counted, how baselines are set, which countries’ shortfalls get named — and the parties will spend the Yerevan sessions arguing about the method as much as the results. Readers should treat every headline number from the review with a healthily sceptical eye — as a starting bid, not a settlement.
Which is exactly where the Kunming Dialogue comes in. China’s environment minister and Canada’s environment minister are expected to attend, together with representatives of the COP16 and COP17 presidencies, to discuss accelerating implementation of the framework. The timing is strategic: three weeks before Yerevan, the dialogue is a chance to frame the review’s storyline before the formal sessions begin. Whoever sets the frame in September tends to own the narrative in October.
Picture the sequence. September 7 to 9 in Kunming: ministers around a table, agreeing on how the implementation story should be told. Five weeks later in Yerevan: the same themes, but with 196 parties, up to 30,000 attendees and a two-week negotiating calendar. The September meeting is the small room where the story gets agreed; the October meeting is the large room where it gets contested. If the small room produces a shared reading of the review’s meaning, the large room has a much shorter distance to travel.
Kunming also carries a specific weight in this framework’s history. The framework’s name begins with Kunming — the city where the preparatory phase was steered and where the trajectory of the agreement was set — so a dialogue held there is a deliberate reference back to the founding moment. What the September meeting can realistically produce is a shared reading of the review and a joint push on the means of implementation: a statement that resource mobilization and subsidy redirection are the binding constraints, and a signal that the parties are prepared to treat them as the core of the Yerevan conversation rather than as agenda padding.
Georgia’s prime minister has accepted an invitation to attend the leaders’ summit in Yerevan. In a South Caucasus context that is not a minor detail: hosting a biodiversity summit is also a piece of national positioning, and a leaders’ summit gives the review a political weight it would otherwise lack. A review with heads of government attached is harder to file away quietly than a technical meeting, and that changes the incentive for every party to bring something concrete.
The underlying question of the whole exercise is where the money goes, and the review’s own draft answers it bluntly: resource mobilization is slow. Targets can be reached on paper through boundary changes and listing decisions; they can only be sustained with operating funds, staff and enforcement. Without the funding line, the targets become slogans and the review becomes a ritual.
In the end, the math works only if the funding line moves. The framework’s targets were agreed with a cost attached; the parties have known the financing range since the negotiation, and they will face it again in the Yerevan resource-mobilization discussion. The gap between ambition and appropriations is where the actual negotiation sits, and this review is the first formal occasion on which that gap is measured in public. That is the number I would underline, because it is the one that converts the review from commentary into a budget conversation.
A successful Yerevan, in budget terms, is not the one with the most applause. It is the one that leaves with a clear resource-mobilization outcome: a target or a trajectory for implementation finance, a concrete step on harmful subsidies, and a governance line that survives into the decisions. Those are the numbers that will be checked in two years’ time, and a review that produces them will have done its job. A review that produces headlines instead will have spent its one chance at a global audit on ceremony.
The review will also be read against the national plans. Parties were expected to align their national biodiversity strategies with the framework, and the pace of that alignment is a second-order measure of seriousness. A framework whose targets advance while national implementation plans lag is a framework living on promises; the review text will show whether the two are converging or drifting apart. That gap is checkable in the documents, and it will tell the same story as the funding line.
The harmful subsidy line deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is the clearest case where the framework is asking governments to spend political capital. Redirecting a subsidy is not a technical adjustment; it is a transfer of money and influence from one constituency to another, and every government at Yerevan knows which of its own subsidies is sitting in the room. That is why the Nairobi draft’s finding on this line is the most predictive number in the whole review: it measures how much appetite the parties actually have for the framework’s harder commitments. The targets are popular; the subsidy redirection is not, and the gap between the two is the real distance the review has to travel.
None of this argues for cynicism about the review itself. A first global audit is a necessary instrument even when its results are uncomfortable — it converts scattered national reports into a single public ledger, and public ledgers have a way of becoming binding. The question is simply which column of the ledger moves after Yerevan: the assets column, by adding more paper; or the means column, by adding money. The Kunming Dialogue and the review text will both be judged against that single distinction.
Fair enough — the protection targets deserve credit where they have genuinely moved, and the Nairobi draft itself says that side reads better. But the honest reading of this review is the reverse of the usual headline: the story is not that biodiversity is doing better, it is that the means to sustain it are doing worse. And that is not a story about nature; it is a story about budgets. Governments find it easy to announce protected areas and hard to appropriate the running costs, and the first global review has now documented that asymmetry in an official text.
So the question for September and October is whether the means column catches up. The Kunming Dialogue is the opening move: a high-visibility push to define the review as a call to fund implementation rather than a report card to file. Whether it succeeds is checkable — in the review’s language on resource mobilization, in the finance decisions that follow Yerevan, and in whether the harmful subsidy line finally shows movement. Credit where it is due, and that is fair enough — but don’t call it a turnaround yet. The balance sheet has two columns, and only one of them is moving. Watch the other one closely in Yerevan — it is the column that decides whether the framework means anything.