SBSTTA-28 and SBI-7: the last scientific and technical checkpoint before Yerevan

Published on 23/06/2026

Before any government arrives in Yerevan in October, the Convention on Biological Diversity's two subsidiary bodies meet back-to-back in Nairobi to finish the technical groundwork that COP17 will build on.

27 JUL – 1 AUG

SBSTTA-28 — the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice meets at UNEP Headquarters in Nairobi, refining the scientific indicators that will underpin the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's monitoring framework.

4 – 12 AUG

SBI-7 — the Subsidiary Body on Implementation follows immediately after, also in Nairobi, reviewing how Parties are translating the Framework into national strategies and identifying where implementation support is most needed.

Why this matters for COP17

SBSTTA-28's agenda centres on the global review of collective progress in implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework — the first such review since the Framework's adoption at COP15 in 2022. SBI-7 then carries that review into questions of resource mobilisation, capacity-building, and the operational machinery Parties need to act on it. Together, the two meetings produce the recommendations that COP17's negotiators in Yerevan will actually work from.

Country reports submitted ahead of these meetings form the evidentiary basis for COP17's first global stocktake on the 2030 targets.

The line to this Symposium

This Symposium convenes in the window between SBI-7 and COP17 — close enough to engage directly with what comes out of Nairobi, early enough to feed Working Group recommendations into the Yerevan agenda before governments finalise their positions. Delegates following Working Group A: Legal & institutional frameworks in particular will want to track SBI-7's discussion of implementation support, since it speaks directly to the governance questions this stream is built around.

Provisional agendas and pre-session documentation for both meetings are published by the CBD Secretariat as they become available.