YEREVAN, Armenia — Scorching wildfires, disastrous floods and the looming mass extinction of species weren’t enough to convince wealthy nations to unlock crucial funds needed to halt biodiversity loss at a global nature summit this week.  

As countries around the world race against the clock to protect what’s left of the Earth’s collapsing ecosystems, global talks aimed at speeding up nature protection efforts yielded underwhelming results.  

The United Nations COP17 on biodiversity ended on Saturday with a renewed promise from countries to speed up global efforts to protect nature and restore depleted ecosystems by 2030.   

But behind that grand gesture, governments are still struggling to unlock the hundreds of billions needed to meet global biodiversity protection targets. The reason? A profound and unresolved disagreement over where that money should come from. 

“If we’re mutually unhappy that’s probably the closest we can get to on these very delicate compromises,” said a member of the Swiss delegation just before the text was adopted.

After two weeks of negotiations over how to speed up efforts to protect ecosystems, nearly 200 countries secured a hard-fought agreement to “accelerate the implementation” of the global biodiversity framework  “including by increased ambition in addressing the gaps, challenges and barriers related to implementation,” according to a draft of the text, the final version of which was not immediately available.

Armenian Environment Minister Hambardzum Matevosyan, who presided over the summit, said negotiators had “achieved more than we could have expected.”

But in the end, governments could not agree on how to increase the number of countries currently contributing to biodiversity finance, instead only stating the obvious: that more funds would be better.

The summit exposed a growing chasm between nations over who should be held financially responsible for funding conservation measures worldwide: historically wealthy countries whose economies have caused immense damage to the environment, or newly rich states whose economies have grown exponentially in the last three decades. 

“This COP was always going to be difficult,” said Steven Guilbeault, former environment minister for Canada, adding that “COP17’s real legacy will be decided far beyond these walls, when words need to translate to action.”

Negotiators are leaving Yerevan with many issues left to resolve between now and the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador, including on how to attract more companies that benefit from nature to fund conservation projects via the Cali Fund, a landmark vehicle aimed at mobilizing private finance into nature established in 2024.

Governments know they are running out of time. At COP17, scientific experts reiterated that a million species are at risk of extinction, and the U.N. has identified an annual biodiversity financing gap of $700 billion.  

“We’re not on track to stop and reverse the biodiversity loss by 2030,” said Monique Barbut, France’s environment minister, during a COP17 plenary session on Wednesday. The world needs to “mobilize all international funding sources” to make it happen, she insisted.

The talks also ran long due to disagreements over language related to the involvement of Indigenous peoples in a key decision-making body of the Convention.

The dispute 

The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity relies on the consensus that rich countries should pay more to protect nature because of the pressure their societies and economies exert on global ecosystems. 

Since its ratification in the 1990s, a group of wealthy countries including Canada, Australia, Japan, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway and some EU members have been funding efforts to implement the Convention.

Now, those countries want other high-income nations to chip in more. “We all know that we need more resources to ensure the effective implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework,” said Jessika Roswall, the EU’s environment commissioner.

But during the negotiations, non-donor countries — which include China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Argentina — pushed back against any kind of income-related criteria to determine who should or shouldn’t be paying. 

The deadlock angered some nations set to benefit from a larger donor base. “Are you telling me that rich petro-states who are in many cases wealthier than some of the original list of donors and responsible for a ton of emissions and harmful practices that directly affect biodiversity shouldn’t contribute to the fund?” said Juan Carlos Navarro, Environment Minister for Panama on Wednesday, as negotiations were ongoing. 

The countries “don’t want to have the same obligations as developed countries on this issue [and] bring up the argument of ecological responsibilities,” said Juliette Landry, a senior research fellow at the think tank IDDRI. 

In the end, countries agreed simply to state that “contributions from more Parties
would improve the mobilization of biodiversity finance” and invited others to contribute voluntarily, the draft text shows.

Some successes 

Despite the divisions, many hailed the final agreement as a win for green multilateralism as governments remain committed to the overarching goal of protecting 30% of Earth’s land and sea areas and increase financing for biodiversity to $200 billion annually by 2030. 

“In Yerevan, we saw environmental multilateralism prevail once again. Countries came together, found the spirit of compromise and allowed us to agree important decisions that will support real progress for people and for planet,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UN Environment Programme.

After two weeks of endless meetings, panels and plenary sessions, negotiators agreed to strengthen the role of cities and local governments in implementing biodiversity goals, and improve how biodiversity funding reaches them. They also adopted decisions to support capacity-building and scientific cooperation, and agreed that more needs to be done to protect marine ecosystems.

Countries also recognized the need to reduce subsidies funding economic activities that harm nature and create incentives for activities that protect it. “Incentive reform has moved from the margins to the mainstream of the biodiversity agenda,” said Eva zabey, CEO of the Business for Nature coalition.

Some governments including Germany, Iceland, Uzbekistan and Spain made fresh financial commitments totalling $1.8 billion to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund and the Global Environment Facility, the funding structures set up to implement the Convention. Under the GBF, countries have pledged to mobilize $200 billion annually by 2030.  

The U.N. Environment Programme also published a report showing that nature restoration is underway at an “unprecedented scale” with over 250 million hectares of land under restoration worldwide.

Still, countries remain off track on meeting their 2030 targets.

In Yerevan, green groups welcomed the agreement but criticized its lack of ambition key issues.

“Political promises made in Yerevan set good intentions, but won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation such as insufficient finance, fiscal and debt constraints, the nearly empty coffers of the Cali Fund and urgent reform of harmful subsidies,” said An Lambrechts, a biodiversity politics expert with Greenpeace International.

Governments have struggled to stay the course since inking the Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022. Though many countries have adopted national biodiversity strategies, financial flows to conservation projects are nowhere near where they ought to be. Geopolitical shifts and economic crises have also made it harder for governments — including the 27 EU member countries — to prioritize environmental protection. 

Countries agreed to renew talks to implement the objectives of the convention in Ecuador.

As the world teeters on ecological collapse, it’s occasionally nice to hear that an animal that was once thought to have gone extinct was just really good at hiding. Take the Bangka slow loris, an extremely slow primate that lives in trees and is also venomous.

For years, it had been considered critically endangered, maybe even fully extinct, as the last time any scientific team saw one was back in the 1930s. But it’s back, and according to new research published in Spixiana, there are at least 90 of them hanging out on the island of Bangka, off the southern coast of Sumatra.

Scientists thought this nocturnal tree-dweller was gone, but local residents and Indonesia’s Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center knew better. They’d been looking into the loris’ gigantic glassy eyes for about a decade, as Alobi workers had been spotting the loris since about 2015. As researchers assumed these slow-footed creatures had been lost to time, they’d actually been hanging out in backyards and getting nearly hit by cars. What the neighborhood cats and raccoons are to your neck of the woods, the slow loris was to Bangka.

Toxic Armpits and Secondary Tongues

“Slow” isn’t just a nickname. It’s a pretty good description of the creature’s whole demeanor. You’d think it would make them a great snack for predators, but that’s where its venomous qualities come into play. It secretes a toxin from armpit glands that it licks to mix it with its saliva and then delivers a venomous bite capable of putting a grown human into anaphylactic shock. It’s also got a specialized “toothcomb” for gouging bark and a secondary tongue underneath its main tongue that it uses to clean the toothcomb.

The species evaded scientific detection for nearly a century even though it’s only about an hour away from Jakarta. As for why researchers assumed it had gone extinct, it’s the usual explanation: the man-made horrors of obliterating its habitat to mine tin and to plant palm oil plantations so your chocolate bar is smooth and creamy.

The post Adorable Venomous Primate Thought Extinct Discovered Hanging Out in People’s Backyards appeared first on vice.

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The 1975 film “Jaws,” in which a local government hires a shark hunter to protect the town’s tourism industry, delighted me as a 10-year-old. But other than its infamous opening sequence, I don’t recall being scared. My younger sister, however, developed a years-long fear of deep water, even our 11-foot-deep pool. Maybe I’d just cultivated too much shark knowledge, well aware that these apex predators are docile and do not hunt humans like they do in Peter Benchley’s novel. The book and the film — I consumed both and can report that Steven Spielberg’s adaptation is better — only instilled in me a deeper love and respect for sharks. They are still my favorite fish to observe in aquariums or the ocean.

Outside of the movies, shark bounties are uncommon these days. That’s why news this week that Greenland was planning to cull 1,000 Greenland sharks was so alarming to many online. Officials in the Avannaata municipality on the island nation’s west coast approved the plan, offering fishers 300 Danish kroner, or about $45, per shark heart. The government complained that hungry sharks are eating too much Atlantic cod and Greenland halibut, cutting into what humans can bring home and damaging their gear. Lars Erik Gabrielsen, mayor of Avannaata, told The Guardian, “We need to safeguard the income of fishermen and the catch so that we can continue to eat the foods that we have relied on for generations.”

Conservationists and shark lovers were outraged at the proposal. Nick Dulvy, a professor and marine conservationist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, called it a “disaster” and said that biologically, the sharks are “the most sensitive species in the ocean to overfishing.” Marine ecologist Spencer Roberts, whose advocacy work includes calling out shark poaching, posted on X that “There is a psychotic sense of entitlement spreading around the world that imagines humans own the fish in the sea and demands retaliatory killing of predators who rely on these fish. Even centuries-old sages of the Arctic Ocean are not safe from this deranged human delusion.”

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Indeed, the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is bizarre and misunderstood, basically being the couch potato of the depths of the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, where waters are just above freezing. Known as an abyssal species, it slothfully trawls the shadows like some mournful Lovecraftian being, possessing an especially sluggish metabolism, which isn’t surprising considering its size. Greenland sharks weigh in at one ton and reaching up to 23 feet in length. The maximum lifespan can average 400 years, the longest lifespan of any known vertebrate, meaning there are apparently Greenland sharks that are older than the United States. If that doesn’t blow you out of the water, I don’t know what will. Humans are famously bad at mentally fathoming deep time, so thinking about these ghostly rotund things hiding in the dark of the ocean, outliving empires like an ichthyological Ozymandias, fills me with even more awe than most sharks do.

In a rare spot of good news, the local government dropped the plan after national officials questioned its legality, but a future cull hasn’t been ruled out. Still, it’s worth upholding this turnaround as an example of why speaking out on animal rights can be successful. We don’t need to just sit back and watch the extinction of any species that doesn’t directly benefit us, while of course recognizing that fishers have to eat too. Some have proposed reimbursing fishers or using acoustic deterrents instead of mass slaughter.

But it’s more than just Greenland sharks at risk, with an estimated 79 million sharks dying in fisheries in 2019. At least 25 million of those species are threatened. As coral reefs struggle to survive, many sharks are losing their main food source, but humans are to blame for that one. These animals can be dangerous, same as a grizzly bear or elephant, but people tend to value sharks a lot less. This is in spite of their critical role in a healthy environment. Sharks aren’t monsters, they evolved to fill very specific roles in the ocean — a huge block in the Jenga of life — and if they go, our oceans would dramatically tumble in ways that would negatively impact humans too.

“Jaws” is a fantastic film if you can suspend your disbelief about a great white being the menace of the seas. That’s really us, but it doesn’t have to be.

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