Beyond Protection, Towards Survival

Yerevan, the first global review of collective progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and why the living Earth now needs Natural Rights Led Governance

From 19 to 30 October 2026, Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity will meet in Yerevan, Armenia, for COP17 under the theme “Taking action for nature.” For the first time since the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, or KMGBF, was adopted in 2022, governments will formally review their collective progress towards its 2030 targets and 2050 vision. 

The review comes at an awkward moment. Humanity has never possessed more data about the living world, yet the evidence shows that the systems sustaining life continue to deteriorate. The question facing Yerevan is therefore larger than whether governments have submitted their reports or expanded protected areas. It is whether biodiversity diplomacy is still principally negotiating how much nature to protect, or whether ecological decline has reached the point where governance must instead secure the conditions for survival.

At a glance: five messages for Yerevan

• The biological decline remains profound. WWF's Living Planet Report 2026 finds a 73% average decline in the size of monitored vertebrate wildlife populations between 1970 and 2022, with freshwater populations down 85%, terrestrial populations 69% and marine populations 59%. Asia-Pacific recorded a 49% average decline. 

  
  

• The Earth-system diagnosis is worsening. Seven of the nine planetary boundaries are now transgressed, and all seven are at their highest recorded levels of transgression. Ocean acidification became the seventh breached boundary in 2025. 

  
  

• The implementation machinery is stronger than the outcomes. By August 2026, 172 Parties had submitted national targets and 130 Parties national reports, yet fewer than half of the aligned national targets assessed were on track. Finance, harmful-subsidy reform, business impacts and sustainable consumption were among the largest gaps. 

  
  

• The financial system still runs overwhelmingly against nature. In 2023, around US$7.3 trillion flowed into nature-negative activities while only US$220 billion supported nature-based solutions, a ratio of more than 30 to 1. 

  
  

• The missing shift is constitutional, not merely technical. Natural Rights Led Governance, or NRLG, argues that ecological limits should not sit at the margins of economic decision-making. They should define the space within which development, finance, property and political power remain legitimate.

The best-documented collapse in history

Humanity has built an extraordinary capacity to observe the living Earth. The problem is that observation is increasingly documenting decline rather than preventing it. The Living Planet Report 2026, released on 7 October, tracks 35,803 population trends covering 5,790 vertebrate species. Its headline finding is stark: monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73% since 1970. Freshwater systems are in the deepest trouble, with an 85% decline. Latin America and the Caribbean recorded the steepest regional decline at 95%, followed by Africa at 80% and Asia-Pacific at 49%. 

There is an important qualification. The index does not mean that 73% of all animals have disappeared. It measures the average proportional change in monitored populations. Nor is every population falling: roughly half of those monitored are stable or increasing. Tigers, for example, increased globally from about 3,200 animals in 2010 to around 5,700 in 2025. Recovery is therefore possible when pressure is removed and governance works. 

But isolated recoveries cannot conceal the system-level signal. The Planetary Health Check 2026 reaches a parallel conclusion from a different scientific tradition. Seven of nine planetary boundaries, climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, novel entities and ocean acidification, are now outside the safe operating space. All seven are worsening. The report also warns that repeated heat, drought, fire and ecosystem degradation may be weakening terrestrial carbon sinks, raising the possibility that models overestimate the resilience of the land systems on which climate strategies depend. 

The message is uncomfortable but simple: we now possess world-class monitoring of planetary deterioration. A collapse that is measured is not necessarily a collapse that is managed.

The Yerevan paradox: record reporting, receding nature

The KMGBF has generated remarkable administrative mobilisation. By the February 2026 deadline, 125 Parties had submitted their seventh national reports in time for integration into the global review. By the Nairobi negotiations in August, that number had risen to around 130, while 172 Parties, almost 90%, had submitted national targets aligned in some form with the Framework. This matters. Multilateral environmental agreements fail when countries do not translate global objectives into national commitments. 

Yet the State of Biodiversity Action, the first global report on collective progress, shows that engagement has not yet translated into implementation on the necessary scale. Fewer than half of aligned national targets assessed by Parties were on track, with some of the widest gaps in finance mobilisation, subsidy reform, business impacts and dependencies, and sustainable consumption.  

That is the Yerevan paradox, the machinery of commitment has become more sophisticated while the biological system it is designed to protect continues to weaken. The 30×30 target illustrates the problem. Around 20% of terrestrial and inland-water areas and 10% of the ocean are currently protected or conserved. On existing national commitments, those figures are projected to reach only about 27% of land and inland waters and 12% of the ocean by 2030, below the 30% goal even if current commitments are fully implemented. And area alone is an inadequate measure. A protected ecosystem can still be fragmented, poorly governed, ecologically degraded or disconnected from the wider landscape on which it depends.

The Framework itself recognizes this. Target 3 requires areas to be effectively conserved, ecologically representative, connected and equitably governed, including recognition of Indigenous and traditional territories where applicable.  The problem is therefore no longer simply how much land governments can color green on a map. It is whether the living system is recovering.

Protection without regeneration cannot close the gap

Conservation policy often begins with the assumption that sufficient areas of intact nature remain to be protected. But much of the ecological stock is already damaged. CBD guidance for Target 2 estimates that 20-40% of the world's land area may be degraded, affecting the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people. Wetlands have suffered particularly severe losses. Target 2 therefore requires at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, inland-water, coastal and marine ecosystems to be under effective restoration by 2030. 

This distinction is fundamental. A conservation system concerned mainly with stopping additional destruction is insufficient when existing ecosystems have already lost ecological function. The agenda must move from protection to regeneration: recovering soil fertility, hydrological function, habitats, ecological connectivity, biodiversity and the capacity of living systems to renew themselves. That is why regeneration cannot be treated as a secondary environmental program. It is a form of infrastructure maintenance for civilization itself.

The arithmetic of self-destruction

The most revealing biodiversity indicator may not be biological at all. It may be financial.Target 19 calls for at least US$200 billion a year for biodiversity from all sources by 2030, including international flows to developing countries of at least US$20 billion annually by 2025 and US$30 billion by 2030. Target 18 requires harmful incentives to be reduced by at least US$500 billion a year by 2030. 

Yet the wider financial system still points in the opposite direction. UNEP's State of Finance for Nature 2026 estimates that US$7.3 trillion flowed into nature-negative activities in 2023, compared with only US$220 billion invested in nature-based solutions. Private finance supplied just US$23 billion of the positive flows. UNEP estimates that investment in nature-based solutions needs to reach about US$571 billion annually by 2030. 

The question is therefore not simply how to raise more conservation money. It is why the global economy continues to finance degradation at vastly greater scale. IPBES reaches the same conclusion from another direction. Its Nexus Assessment estimates the unaccounted environmental, social and health costs of existing economic approaches at US$10-25 trillion every year. More than half of global GDP depends moderately or highly on nature. No conservation system can indefinitely outspend an economy designed to reward depletion.

The balance sheet that records wealth while liquidating life

The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment 2026 provides perhaps the strongest evidence yet for a stock-based understanding of development. Since 1992, average human-produced capital per person has increased by around 100%, while natural capital stocks per person have declined by about 40%. At the same time, fewer than 1% of publicly reporting companies mention their biodiversity impacts in their reports. This exposes a fundamental accounting problem.

A country can cut down forests, drain wetlands, mine groundwater, degrade soil and reduce fish stocks while reporting rising income and investment. Produced capital appears on the balance sheet. The drawdown of living capital often does not. For a time, GDP can rise while ecological security falls.

Then the losses arrive together, flood exposure increases because wetlands are gone; saline water advances because freshwater systems have weakened; fisheries collapse; heat intensifies as vegetation disappears; agricultural productivity declines; and governments spend more repairing damage that the previous growth model helped create. An economy that consumes the natural stock supporting its future income is simply not growing. It is liquidating its own foundation.

Why “protection” is no longer enough

The language of environmental policy has long been the language of protection: protect forests, protect species, protect 30% of land and sea. Protection has produced real success. The latest Living Planet Report confirms that targeted action can reverse declines. But protection carries three assumptions that are becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

The first is that nature is principally an object and humanity is its guardian. A guardian decides what receives protection, how much, for how long and under what exceptions. A protected forest can become unprotected through legislation, budget cuts or a declaration of overriding economic interest.

The second assumption is that protection can be geographically isolated. But ecological systems do not respect administrative boundaries. Rivers cross protected-area lines. Pollinators cross farms and forests. Carbon cycles cross borders. Ocean chemistry ignores marine park boundaries.

The high seas demonstrate the scale mismatch. In April 2026, the world crossed the milestone of 10.01% of the ocean formally protected or conserved. Yet only about 1.66% of the high seas is protected or conserved, even though areas beyond national jurisdiction comprise more than 60% of the ocean surface and an estimated 95% of Earth's habitat by volume. The entry into force of the High Seas Treaty in January 2026 creates an important mechanism for closing that gap. 

The third assumption is that biodiversity is an environmental sector. It is not. Agriculture, energy, finance, infrastructure, trade, fisheries and urbanisation generate many of the largest pressures on biodiversity. The IPBES Transformative Change Assessment identifies three underlying causes of biodiversity loss, disconnection from and domination over nature and people; inequitable concentrations of power and wealth; and prioritisation of short-term individual and material gains. 

These are not problems that ministries of environment can solve alone. They are problems of governance. Protection asks how much nature can we afford to save? Survival asks how much ecological destruction can life-support systems absorb before the damage becomes irreversible? The second question is now the more important one.

From environmental aspirations to legal obligations

The legal context is also changing. On 23 July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued its advisory opinion on states' obligations in respect of climate change. The Court held that states have obligations to protect the climate system and other parts of the environment, including duties of due diligence and cooperation. Breaches may constitute internationally wrongful acts and, depending on the circumstances, trigger cessation, guarantees of non-repetition and full reparation. The Court further characterized key climate-protection obligations as obligations owed to the international community as a whole. It also made clear that fossil-fuel production, consumption, licensing or subsidies may, where inconsistent with states' legal obligations, contribute to internationally wrongful conduct. 

The opinion concerns climate law; it does not establish a universal legal personality for nature. But its deeper significance for biodiversity governance is clear. Environmental protection is moving, however gradually, from the language of voluntary policy preference toward the language of duty, prevention, accountability and remedy. That transition creates fertile ground for a wider governance proposition.

Natural Rights Led Governance: from guardianship to standing

Transformative Natural Rights Led Governance (NRLG) begins with the proposition that living systems precede the institutions that regulate them. States, markets, corporations and property regimes exist within ecological conditions; they do not create those conditions. NRLG therefore does not require rivers or forests to mimic human legal personality. Instead, it recognises nature as a rights-holder through accord with nature and natural law: human conduct remains legitimate only where it respects ecological limits, regenerative capacity and the conditions required for life to continue.

The framework rests on seven pillars, now ordered as follows-

NRLG pillar	Failure exposed by the biodiversity crisis	Survival-based response
1. Recognizing Nature as a Rights-Holder	Nature remains dependent on discretionary human protection	Establish ecological standing and non-negotiable ecological floors
2. Protection of Life and Property	Ecosystem decline destroys lives, livelihoods and assets but is often externalised	Treat ecosystem integrity as a precondition for physical and economic security
3. Regenerative Process	Economic systems measure flows while allowing natural stocks to decline	Require continuous replenishment of natural, social and productive capital
4. Nature Justice	Those ecological losses often contributed least to causing them	Prioritise restoration, grants, liability and equitable burden-sharing
5. Equity, Integrity and Shared Rights	Benefits from nature, genetic resources and finance are concentrated	Build transparent, equitable benefit-sharing and common stewardship
6. Peaceful Grievance Resolution	Communities often lack accessible remedies for ecological harm	Establish inclusive, non-violent and accessible grievance mechanisms
7. Community Stewardship and Indigenous Knowledge	Local and Indigenous custodians remain underfunded and underrepresented	Give communities direct finance, co-governance and epistemic standing

The placement of Regenerative Process as Pillar 3 is crucial. Development cannot be judged only by what an economy produces this year. It must also be judged by whether the underlying stocks of water, soil, forests, biodiversity, social resilience and productive capital are being replenished or depleted. The IPBES finding, produced capital up about 100% per person since 1992 while natural capital stocks fell around 40%, makes the case unmistakable. A development model that increases one form of capital by destroying another cannot be called sustainable merely because national income rises.

Finance architecture is emerging, but at nowhere near the required scale

Not all recent progresses represent failure. The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund is now operational. More than US$288 million in projects has been approved, against approximately US$386 million pledged by sovereign and subnational contributors as of June 2025. Its governance also offers an important lesson. By March 2026, 31.9% of GBFF financing supported actions led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, exceeding its 20% aspirational target. The scale, however, remains tiny against global need. 

The same is true of the Cali Fund, established to share benefits arising from commercial use of digital sequence information on genetic resources. The Fund was launched in 2025, received its first contribution only at the end of that year, and allocates 50% of its resources to the self-identified needs of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. COP17 will consider further questions about contribution rates, allocation and operationalisation. The design principle is promising. However, the revenue reality is not yet.

Eleven decisions Yerevan could take

1. Establish a “survival floor”: COP17 should recognise that some ecological thresholds cannot legitimately be traded against short-term economic benefits. National biodiversity strategies should identify ecological minimums for freshwater systems, ecosystem extent, connectivity and functional diversity.

   
   

2. Make the second half of the decade about what must stop: Every Party should identify its three largest domestic drivers of biodiversity loss and publish a dated phase-down or phase-out plan by COP18. Implementation cannot consist only of adding positive projects while destructive incentives continue untouched.

   
   

3. Treat Target 18 as a central financing instrument: The world cannot solve a biodiversity finance gap while continuing to subsidise the activities creating the gap. Harmful-subsidy inventories should become a routine part of national biodiversity reporting, with explicit timetables for reform.

   
   

4. Report natural stocks, not only policy flows: The CBD monitoring framework should show whether forests, wetlands, freshwater, soils, fisheries and ecosystem functions are recovering or declining. Success should not be measured only by money spent, hectares announced or policies adopted.

   
   

5. Apply a reverse burden of proof in critically stressed systems: Where ecosystems are already near or beyond critical thresholds, new activities that add pressure should be required to demonstrate that they will not further undermine ecological integrity. Freshwater systems deserve particular attention given the 85% average decline recorded in monitored freshwater wildlife populations. 

   
   

6. Deliver biodiversity finance increasingly as grants: For climate-vulnerable and debt-stressed developing countries, borrowing to restore global ecological goods can transform environmental responsibility into sovereign debt. Target 19 finance should be predictable, accessible and increasingly grant-based where countries are providing global stewardship benefits.

   
   

7. Make the Cali Fund economically meaningful: Parties should move beyond voluntary expectation by adopting effective domestic measures that require or strongly incentivise major commercial beneficiaries of digital sequence information to contribute, while preserving the Fund's commitment to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

   
   

8. Establish a CBD grievance and facilitation window: Communities facing biodiversity loss should have access to a non-adversarial international mechanism for raising grievances, facilitating dialogue and identifying remedies where national processes fail.

   
   

9. Give future generations institutional representation: Governments should establish independent commissioners, guardians or equivalent mechanisms empowered to assess major plans and projects against long-term ecological consequences.

   
   

10. Integrate biodiversity and climate accounting: COP17 takes place only weeks before COP31. NBSAPs and nationally determined contributions should no longer be developed as parallel documents for interconnected systems. Climate stability depends on biosphere integrity; biodiversity restoration depends on climate stability.

    
    

11. Build a near-real-time living-systems monitoring architecture: Ecological deterioration can occur in days during droughts, fires, floods, heatwaves, cyclones and compound events, while conventional national reporting operates on multi-year cycles.

    
    

CBD Parties should therefore develop an interoperable monitoring architecture combining satellite observations, hydrological and soil data, biodiversity sensors, fisheries information and community-generated evidence. Major disasters should trigger rapid pre-event-versus-post-event ecosystem assessments covering forests, freshwater, wetlands, soils, coastal systems and biodiversity. A living system that can collapse rapidly should not have to wait years to appear in an official report.

A word to each stakeholder

• To negotiators: the global review is not an administrative report card. It is a diagnosis. Its value will depend on whether COP17 converts evidence into obligations, timetables and measurable ecological outcomes.

  
  

• To finance ministers and central banks: biodiversity decline is already a balance-sheet issue. IPBES finds human-produced capital rising while natural capital falls, and fewer than 1% of publicly reporting companies disclose biodiversity impacts. Financial stability cannot indefinitely ignore the deterioration of the assets on which economies depend. 

  
  

• To business and investors: a nature-positive pledge cannot coexist indefinitely with financing deforestation, over-extraction, wetland conversion or ecosystem fragmentation. The 2026 IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment makes clear that every business both depends on and affects nature. 

  
  

• To Indigenous Peoples and local communities: your knowledge is not anecdotal supplementary material. It is part of humanity's longest-running evidence base on how to inhabit ecosystems. The growing share of GBFF funding directed toward community-led action demonstrates that finance architecture can be designed differently.

  
  

• To scientists: monitoring has become extraordinarily sophisticated. The next frontier is translation—turning scientific thresholds into legal, fiscal and investment constraints that decision-makers cannot simply discount.

  
  

• To young people and the media: insist on measuring outcomes. Announcements, hectares pledged, finance facilities created and reports submitted matter only if the condition of the living system improves.

  
  

A view from the delta

I write from Bangladesh, a country formed by rivers at the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna, where the Sundarbans stand between millions of people and the Bay of Bengal. Here, the global biodiversity debate is not abstract. The Bangladesh Forest Department reported in May 2026 that the country had 58 terrestrial and marine protected areas covering around 818,323 hectares. Terrestrial protected areas cover approximately 470,223 hectares, only 3.19% of the country's total area. 

Protection therefore remains geographically limited while ecological pressure operates nationally and across borders. The freshwater crisis is particularly relevant. The Living Planet Report's 85% average decline in monitored freshwater populations has direct resonance in a delta where fish, agriculture, livelihoods and ecosystems depend on river flows originating far beyond national borders.

A delta teaches an elementary law of ecology: downstream survival cannot be separated from upstream decisions. Bangladesh is also beginning to confront the finance side of this problem. Through BIOFIN, the country is developing its first comprehensive biodiversity-finance evidence base using a Policy and Institutional Review, Biodiversity Expenditure Review and Financial Needs Assessment. Options under consideration include biodiversity budget tagging, payments for ecosystem services, a conservation trust fund and reform of environmentally harmful subsidies.  

That work should go further. Biodiversity finance should not merely ask how much government spends on conservation. It should ask whether the entire fiscal system, subsidies, taxes, public investment, infrastructure and financial regulation, is regenerating or depleting natural capital. For climate-vulnerable countries such as Bangladesh, NRLG is therefore not an abstract philosophical project. It is an argument about survival.

The survival clause

Every mature legal system recognizes that some principles are too fundamental to leave entirely to political convenience. Ecological systems now belong in that category. They are not simply one policy interest to be balanced indefinitely against infrastructure, production, consumption and growth. They are the material conditions within which infrastructure, markets, property, political institutions and human rights can exist at all.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework remains one of the most important agreements ever reached for nature. But COP17 will reveal whether it becomes an implementation framework capable of altering ecological outcomes or another sophisticated mechanism for documenting decline.

The difference will not lie in the number of speeches delivered in Yerevan. It will lie in whether governments accept limits to what economic and political power may do to living systems; whether finance is redirected before degradation becomes irreversible; whether natural stocks are measured alongside economic flows; whether communities gain real authority; and whether regeneration becomes a test of development itself.

COP17's theme is “Taking action for nature.” The evidence now demands something deeper, taking responsibility for the survival of life, ours included. Protection was a necessary ambition when environmental governance assumed that enough functioning nature remained to protect.

In a world where seven planetary boundaries are breached, wildlife populations have declined dramatically, trillions still finance nature-negative activities and natural capital continues to fall, protection alone is no longer an adequate governing principle. The next step is survival, and survival requires rights, limits, justice and regeneration.

References

Bangladesh Forest Department (2026). Protected Areas—Terrestrial and Marine. (BForest)

Caesar, L., Sakschewski, B., et al. (2026). Planetary Health Check 2026: A Scientific Assessment of the State of the Planet. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. DOI 10.48485/pik.2026.25. (PIK Publications)

Convention on Biological Diversity (2026). COP17, Yerevan, Armenia, 19–30 October 2026; Global Review of Collective Progress; State of Biodiversity Action. (Convention on Biological Diversity)

Convention on Biological Diversity (2026). Nairobi meetings pave the way for 2026 UN Biodiversity Conference. National reports, national targets and implementation-gap findings. (Convention on Biological Diversity)

Convention on Biological Diversity. Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework Targets 2, 3, 18 and 19. (Convention on Biological Diversity)

Convention on Biological Diversity. Cali Fund for the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits from Digital Sequence Information. (Convention on Biological Diversity)

Global Environment Facility. Global Biodiversity Framework Fund—funding and portfolio status. (GEF)

International Court of Justice (2025). Advisory Opinion: Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change, 23 July 2025. (Caribbean UN)

IPBES (2024). Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health—Nexus Assessment. (IPBES)

IPBES (2024). Transformative Change Assessment: Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and Determinants of Transformative Change. (IPBES)

IPBES (2026). Methodological Assessment of the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature's Contributions to People. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17185116. (IPBES)

Khan, M. Zakir Hossain (2026). Transformative Natural Rights Led Governance, Second Edition. Change Initiative. The revised pillar sequence in this version supersedes the earlier sequence appearing in the draft article.

UNEP (2026). State of Finance for Nature 2026: Nature in the Red—Powering the Trillion Dollar Nature Transition Economy. (UNEP - UN Environment Programme)

UNEP-WCMC (2026). World reaches milestone for nature: 10% of ocean now officially protected. (UNEP-WCMC)

UNDP BIOFIN Bangladesh (2026). Building Bangladesh's Biodiversity Finance Evidence Base and Biodiversity Finance Plan. (BIOFIN)

WWF/ZSL (2026). Living Planet Report 2026: The Science of Hope. (World Wildlife Fund)

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