COP17 in Yerevan: Nature Can Wait, Extraction Cannot

According to Reporterre, the COP17 on biodiversity, held in Yerevan, Armenia, from 19 to 30 October, closed in the night of 30 October without notable progress. The outlet judges that this outcome makes the goals for protecting living things unattainable by 2030. It describes a conference ending in the usual way: satisfaction over the "overall momentum", regret over the lack of resources committed. The details of the texts and the sums are not in the material we have, so we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Still, one can ask the structural question. Why do these summits, COP after COP, produce promises and so little change? Because they ask states to volunteer to slow a process that the very organisation of the global economy feeds. Living nature does not erode by accident: it erodes because forests, soils, seabeds and subsoils are converted into commodities.

Marxists speak of a "metabolic rift": accumulation demands an ever-growing flow of energy and materials, and passes the cost on to ecosystems and to the poorest populations, those who contributed least to the destruction. Put plainly: the biodiversity disappearing fastest is often found in the countries that supply the soy, copper, cobalt, timber or palm oil that others cannot get enough of. Protecting living things therefore also means touching those who consume, those who produce and those who collect the profits.

This is where dependency comes in. Many Southern economies were shaped to supply raw materials and cheap labour to the centre; debt and conditional loans lock that position in place. Asking an indebted country to place its forests off-limits while demanding foreign currency to repay its creditors is like handing it the handbrake and pressing the accelerator. Without substantial financing and without challenging the terms of trade, "protection" remains a line in a communiqué.

We should also read "investment opportunities" with suspicion. Mining concessions, land grabs, offset markets: part of what is presented as conservation extends dispossession, transferring to private capital what communities have managed in common for generations. The peoples who live on these territories are rarely the ones who sign the agreements.

What remains to be seen is what the Southern delegations secured, or did not, on financing. Reporterre, in the extract we have, does not say, and we await the rest. But the general finding already carries the sobriety of foretold failures: as long as destruction is profitable, voluntary commitments will look like pious wishes. While Yerevan applauds its "momentum", the bulldozers, for their part, have no 2030 deadline to meet.