In a development that will shock absolutely no one who has been paying attention for the past three and a half decades, governments appear on track to maintain their flawless record of never once meeting a biodiversity target in the 34-year history of the UN convention. Two weeks of negotiations at biodiversity Cop17 in Yerevan, Armenia, wrapped up Saturday morning with countries vowing to try really hard this time to meet this decade's goals - protecting 30% of the planet for nature, restoring nearly a third of Earth's degraded ecosystems, and reforming $500bn (£410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies. These were agreed just four years ago by nearly every government on the planet, with the ambitious aim of transforming humanity's relationship with nature. Progress has been made in some areas, but governments are way off track on almost all of the targets. The UK, for instance, is set to meet precisely three of the 23.

After talks that ran overnight from Friday into Saturday morning, countries signed off on several measures, including a commitment to ramp up action on meeting existing targets and reaffirming a goal to increase biodiversity finance to $30bn a year by the end of the decade. The fact that "reaffirming a goal" counts as a win tells you most of what you need to know.

During the conference, environment ministers, activists and officials appealed for significant changes to how these summits function, so that governments might actually follow through on meaningful action regarding the drivers of biodiversity loss. Panama's environment minister, Juan Carlos Navarro - a veteran conservationist with a refreshingly low tolerance for nonsense - said the Cop process had been "designed to fail," arguing that decisions should be taken by a majority rather than consensus, which currently allows "one idiot" to prevent agreement. "A lot of what's going on out here at the Cop is just a bunch of baloney and beautiful speeches and BS," he told AFP earlier this week. "We cannot have - we cannot expect - a consensus between every nation on Earth on every topic. That's ridiculous. Cops have been designed to fail, and they are not disappointing." He also suggested the UN host a single environmental Cop each year to tackle climate, biodiversity, plastics and other issues in one go. "This just makes my blood boil, because while we fiddle, Rome burns," he added, presumably while eyeing the nearest exit.

The negotiations in the Armenian capital saw Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Russia water down language on environmental ambition in the final agreement, while wealthier governments remained divided on who should contribute more financial resources. European nations would like to see additions to the list of donor states, since China and several Gulf states are still classified as developing countries in the UN process despite decades of rapid economic development. The final agreement in Yerevan left this issue conveniently open. Key decisions on a fund to mobilise resources from firms that profit from digital forms of biodiversity - pharmaceutical companies, for instance - were postponed to the next summit in Ecuador in two years' time. It had been hoped the fund would generate £1bn a year for nature conservation, with a significant share going to Indigenous communities. It has so far raised just over $10,000, which is roughly the cost of a moderately nice used car.

The calls for changes to the biodiversity Cop process echo an intervention by leading policy experts during climate Cop29 in Azerbaijan in 2024, who said the summit was "no longer fit for purpose" and needed to shift focus to implementation. Ruth Davis, the UK's nature envoy, said she recognised the meetings could be "extremely frustratiing" (her spelling, not ours, though the sentiment is universal), but that a huge amount of implementation was happening around the world. "We've got to make the system actually deliver outcomes for people, otherwise they'll lose confidence in it," she said. "In the end, this is a process that is owned by governments who are parties to it. But I know we are going to find friends and allies in making the process work for the citizens of countries for whom this is really important, not least because they are the ones facing the impacts."

Efforts to reform the UN's sprawling environmental agenda are already under way. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN environment programme, said current systems were driving change but moving too slowly. "Right now, the environmental agenda is very cluttered. There are lots of meetings, important as each one is. Let's begin with the easy stuff, like programmatic overlap between conventions, which has an energy-sapping effect," said Andersen. "We identified the illegal wildlife trade back in the 70s as a problem, then we identified migratory species, then broader biodiversity, then wetlands. Each of these conventions came along at the right time, but we now have a plethora of them. Maybe we should think about that." A radical suggestion, to be sure, but at this point even the baloney has baloney.