Heather Bingham, lead of the Protected Planet Initiative at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), stresses that achieving 30 per cent protected and conserved area coverage is only one part of the picture

In December 2022, my colleagues and I at UNEP-WCMC celebrated a historic agreement by governments to protect 30 per cent of the Earth’s lands and waters by 2030.

Now, with only six years left, the countdown to this headline-grabbing target is well underway. With the world’s most important meeting on biodiversity fast approaching (COP16), many eyes are on the progress countries have made and their plans to deliver on their commitments.

I lead UNEP-WCMC’s work on the Protected Planet Initiative. We track protected and conserved areas around the world, providing the official record of progress on this global target, known as Target 3 of the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework”. So, what does the latest data tell us? How close are we to achieving the most well-known element of the target, 30 per cent coverage by 2030?

As of August 2024, 17.5 per cent of Earth’s terrestrial and inland waters are protected or conserved, alongside 8.5 per cent of the ocean. It’s clear that the international community has come a long way since the start of the decade, when the data available at the time indicated that these figures had not yet officially reached 16 per cent and eight per cent respectively.

While accelerated efforts are clearly needed, the 30 per cent target may be within our reach. However, the real picture is much more complicated.

Target 3 “beyond 30x30”

Protecting 30 per cent of the Earth is the aim that most people have heard of, but this is actually just a single step on the ambitious pathway to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity.

First, it’s one target under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which includes four long-term goals for 2050 and 23 action-oriented targets to be achieved by 2030. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have agreed that we need to achieve all of these goals and targets to address the nature crisis. Target 3 is critically important, but it is far from the entire solution.

Second, Target 3 has many other components beyond just achieving 30 per cent coverage. It calls for protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs)*:

• To be established in the places that most need conserving
• To be geographically well-connected
• To be representative of all the world’s biodiversity
• To be effectively conserved and managed
• To be equitably governed

Third, the target states that Indigenous and traditional territories should be recognised as part of the implementation of Target 3, and that actions to advance the target should be taken with respect for the rights of Indigenous People and local communities. It is vital to ensure that people are not negatively impacted on the pathway towards achieving Target 3. In fact, the collaboration of Indigenous Peoples and local communities - on their own terms - will be crucial to making Target 3 a success, not least because they manage much of the world’s land. Despite this, data on protected and conserved areas reported through official channels is still skewed towards those managed by governments.

For these reasons, designating 30 per cent of the planet as protected and conserved is not enough to achieve Target 3. These areas also need to be effective in terms of where they are, how they are managed and how they uphold human rights.

How much progress have we made on Target 3?

It’s important to recognise that the enabling conditions surrounding Target 3 have advanced substantially since 2022. We have a monitoring framework for the GBF that provides a standardised way of tracking the global goals and targets. Within this, Parties to the CBD have agreed a headline indicator for Target 3, which countries will contribute to when they submit their national reports or provide data to the Protected Planet Initiative.

The existence of a monitoring framework and indicators adopted at the same time as the GBF are big steps, which we didn’t have for last decade’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and its Aichi Biodiversity Targets. While the headline indicator for Target 3 originally focused on percentage coverage, there is buy-in across countries and stakeholder groups for indicators that look beyond this aspect of the target.

Key to this is how countries measure the effectiveness of protected and conserved areas: how well managed they are, whether they are equitably governed, and whether they are delivering good conservation outcomes. There is currently no standardised system at the global level for gathering this information. UNEP-WCMC and partners including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and its World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) are working to address this gap with the aim of supporting more meaningful tracking of progress on Target 3.

Central to the development of appropriate methodologies for indicators has been the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (AHTEG) on Indicators. This is a group of experts that was established to work on operationalising the monitoring framework for the GBF in the run-up to the sixteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD (COP16) in October in Colombia.

Ahead of an important meeting of the Parties to the CBD in May, the AHTEG delivered a 300-page document proposing methodologies for goals and targets across the GBF. This document will form the basis of important discussions at COP16, after which it is expected that countries will begin reporting on their progress in earnest. COP16 will also consider important questions around the role of Indigenous and traditional knowledge in monitoring the GBF, alongside a specific set of indicators developed for this purpose.

The vast amount of preparatory work done in the build-up to COP16 will give way in November to a period of great urgency in the implementation of the GBF and monitoring of its progress. UNEP-WCMC will be proud to support this.

To this end, at COP16 in Colombia we will release the Protected Planet Report 2024 in collaboration with IUCN and WCPA. This major piece of work will be the first global update on protected and conserved areas since the adoption of the GBF in 2022, and will give a comprehensive picture of how the world is doing on all elements of Target 3, including and beyond 30x30.

Visit the Protected Planet website to find out more about the initiative, which hosts the World Database on Protected Areas, World Database on OECMs and Global Database on Protected Area Management Effectiveness. 

*OECMs are sites that are outside of protected areas that achieve the long-term effective conservation of biodiversity, even though they may be managed primarily for other reasons.

This article was originally published by Down To Earth

Main image: An Endangered Santa Marta parakeet, which is endemic to Colombia's Santa Marta Mountains (Image: Nick Athanas via Flickr)