30×30 Initiative Hopes To Save 30% Of Wildlife Habitat Worldwide By 2030

 Put simply, the goal of the 30×30 Initiative is the conservation of 30 percent of terrestrial and marine habitat across the globe by 2030. The High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, an intergovernmental organization for the protection of nature, first proposed the initiative in 2020 and got 50 nations including the U.S. to sign on. Since then, the 30×30 Initiative has grown rapidly, with 100 signatories in 2021 (when it was signed at the COP 15 Convention on Biological Diversity). By the end of 2022, over 190 countries were enlisted in the battle for conservation.

... Wildlife conservation can be as simple as introducing legal protection of the land, halting excessive human activity, and a large helping of what the Rewilding Institute calls “benign neglect.” In other areas, the process is more intensive, requiring the reconstruction of land, and the (re)planting of flora. The larger the mass of land for conservation, the more complex it becomes, encompassing land politics and ownership rights as well as purely logistical hurdles.

In America, adhering to the 30×30 framework would mean saving an area twice the size of Texas. As a step towards this goal, Biden’s administration has deployed the ‘America the Beautiful’ program. The importance of getting landowners engaged is clear, with the initiative’s pledge of “listening and learning from the families and communities that know and care for American lands.”

...While, for some, the complexity of the issues the 30×30 initiative has confirms its ambitiousness, it also has its skeptics. For Brian O’Donnell, the director of the Campaign for Nature, 30×30 should be considered a “floor not a ceiling.” Likewise, the large group of scientists following biologist E.O. Wilson’s theory believes that half of the earth should be protected to stifle the downward spiral following biodiversity loss...more