Commentary. The next biodiversity summit will produce familiar language: urgency, transformation and a renewed promise to halt the destruction of nature. The harder question is whether governments will attach money, enforcement and political risk to those words. Our view is straightforward: the biodiversity crisis will not be solved by better declarations. It will be solved when protecting ecosystems becomes a durable public investment.
That argument is not abstract. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that more than one million species face extinction, while conservation action remains too slow and badly underfunded. The warning comes as governments prepare for the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Yerevan, Armenia. UN News reports that financing is expected to be central to the gathering.[1]
The case for urgency is strengthened by a wider social crisis. The UN Development Programme’s latest multidimensional poverty update says 1.2 billion people are living in multidimensional poverty, an increase of 51.5 million from the previous report. The UN says this is the first increase in the index’s global poverty total since it was established in 2010.[1] For communities already struggling to secure food, housing and health care, conservation can sound like a demand to sacrifice immediate needs for distant ecological benefits.
That concern deserves respect. Poorer countries did not create most of the historic emissions, consumption patterns or financial systems that have degraded ecosystems. Farmers, fishers and forest communities can also bear the cost of restrictions designed in capitals far from the landscapes being regulated. Any serious biodiversity policy must therefore include grants, technology transfers, secure land rights and reliable livelihoods. Conservation imposed without justice will fail—and may deepen distrust.
But fairness cannot become an excuse for postponement. Ecosystem loss is itself a poverty multiplier. When wetlands disappear, flood protection weakens. When soils degrade, food becomes more expensive. When fisheries collapse, coastal livelihoods vanish. These costs are often invisible in national budgets because they arrive as disasters, lost income and public-health burdens rather than as a single line item.
The money must follow the promise
Governments often treat biodiversity finance as charitable assistance, released when fiscal conditions are comfortable. That is backwards. Nature underpins economies, so protecting it should be treated as prevention: less expensive than rebuilding coastlines, compensating displaced workers or responding to food shocks after ecosystems have failed.
There is a legitimate counterargument. Public money is already under pressure from war, debt, energy insecurity and humanitarian emergencies. Recent UN reporting describes intensifying crises in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen and Gaza, alongside severe hunger risks and displacement. Global Issues’ roundup of UN-linked reporting captures the scale of those competing demands.[2] In that environment, biodiversity may struggle to compete with threats that are more immediate and politically visible.
Yet the choice is not between humanitarian action and nature. War and poverty make ecological resilience more valuable, not less. Governments should begin with credible priorities: eliminate subsidies that reward destructive extraction, direct development finance toward restoration, and require major infrastructure projects to disclose their impacts on habitats and local communities. Private capital can help, but it cannot replace public rules. Markets routinely undervalue benefits that no individual owns, such as clean water, pollination and flood protection.
The coming summit should also be judged by accountability, not ceremony. Countries need measurable targets, transparent reporting and consequences for missed commitments. Local and Indigenous communities must have a meaningful role in decisions affecting their lands, with benefits shared rather than promised after the fact.
There is no guarantee that diplomacy will deliver this standard. But the alternative—another declaration without financing—would be more than disappointing. It would signal that governments understand the danger yet remain unwilling to pay for prevention.
Our position is not that every conservation proposal is wise, or that economic development should stop. It is that development which destroys its ecological foundations is not development at all. The biodiversity summit should make that principle practical: fund protection, protect people and publish the results.