Is the target to protect 30% of Earth still achievable, and still worthwhile?

Four years ago, nations promised to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 at a biodiversity summit in Montreal. This target, now widely known as the 30×30 goal, could bring a suite of benefits beyond just protecting ecosystems: reducing carbon emissions, safeguarding food and water supplies, even reducing the risk of future pandemics, say supporters.

With four years left to meet the goal, nations are getting ready to meet next month at the latest iteration of the summit, this time in Yerevan, Armenia, where they will grapple with how much land and ocean still needs protecting.

A progress report on the target released this week shows roughly 20% of the land and 10% of the ocean is currently protected. This 30×30 Global Assessment 2026 comes after a landmark UN review in July concluded that national efforts fell well short of what is needed to meet the 2030 biodiversity targets agreed in Montreal.

Here are some key points those heading to Yerevan will be talking about.

Latin America leads the way

Let’s start with a positive. Some parts of the world are doing an impressive job as 2030 looms.

“Two regions stand out in protected and conserved coverage”, says Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature NGO that produced the global assessment.

Latin America has protected 29% of its lands and 26% of the ocean, and for Oceania it is 24% and 41%.

Among individual countries, the Seychelles leads for terrestrial protection, at 68%. Libya, Eritrea and Somalia all have yet to protect anything. In the ocean, both Monaco and Palau report 100% protection, while a host of countries have levels languishing below 1%.

Coming up short: The top line numbers

As the eagle-eyed will have noticed, the regional numbers are all short of 30%, with the honourable exception of Oceania’s ocean protection. The global assessment also shows how far away the 30% goal is, with very little time left on the clock.

Even under what the report authors call a “global acceleration scenario”, where countries without quantified targets raise their game and areas of ocean beyond national jurisdiction are rapidly protected, coverage would still fall short, reaching 29% on land and 26% in the ocean by 2030.

O’Donnell gives short shrift to naysayers who think the target is out of reach and should be given up on. “Cynicism gets us nowhere. In fact, cynicism will be a danger to our planet. For those who dismiss this target, what is the alternative?” he says.

Mind the ocean protection gap

The gap between the target and current protection progress in the ocean is detailed in a separate report, as well as the main progress report. This gap could equally be characterised as a chasm, if that were not so terrestrial a feature.

Currently, around 10% of the ocean is protected, some 35 million sq km, and only 3.5% is deemed to be “fully or highly protected”. Set aside those “high seas” areas beyond national jurisdiction, and the 30×30 target stills looks a way off, with 22% of national waters currently protected.

“The ocean is the critical gap in global progress to 30×30,” O’Donnell says, and existing commitments from governments will only drive the global 10% up to 12%.

There have also been major setbacks in ocean protections as vast areas have been diminished by “PADDD-ing”: protected area downgrading, downsizing, and de-gazettement. Australia’s Coral Sea marine park reduced protection across over 740,000 sq km in 2018 and in the past two years the United States has allowed fishing in all five of the massive protected areas it calls Marine National Monuments.

Is it effective anyway?

More fundamentally, there have long been big questions about how effective much of the protection declared by countries actually is. The worst examples have been dubbed “paper parks”. These are areas protected on maps and counted in databases used to compile progress reports but that in reality protect little or nothing.

A recent piece of work led by Ella Clausius, an ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Australia, illustrates the problem. Her team tried to figure out what is happening below the surface in marine protected areas (MPAs) designed to look after the shallow reefs that are vital habitats for many fish populations.

They looked at fish biomass in 552 MPAs and compared it to what might be expected if there was no protection in the same area, and then extrapolated their findings globally. “At best” a quarter of the current global MPA network is delivering “meaningful conservation outcomes”, they say. If the same holds for ecosystems beyond reefs, then less than 2% of the ocean is effectively protected.

“To be perfectly honest, even the ~2% we report in our paper is only focusing on one element of Target 3,” says Clausius, referring to the target which contains the 30×30 goal.

She also points out that her work only looked at ecological effectiveness, when Target 3 also includes other important factors, such as representation of different ecosystems, connectivity of protected areas, and the recognition of Indigenous peoples. “If we were measuring the proportion of MPAs that meet every element of the target, I suspect our progress would be closer to 0%,” she says.

Beware Goodhart’s Law?

British economist Charles Goodhart is credited with formulating the law that bears his name: When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric, because of inadvertent consequences such as people trying to game the system to achieve the number.

“We’ve seen that play out very clearly in this [ocean protection] space,” says Clausius.

While the 30×30 progress report looks at many of the elements of Target 3 beyond just the area protected, critics say as countries have pushed towards the 30% goal, they have lost sight of the wider point encompassed by those elements: actually protecting the ocean.

Clausius says the area target still has merit as something to work towards and a way of mobilising countries to action, but adds: “I don’t think area coverage has merit as a measure of how successfully we’re conserving the oceans”.

Others are more positive, hoping the Yerevan meeting can drive the numbers higher.

Steven Guilbeault, until recently Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, says the 30% target still has value, and is still within reach.

“As someone who until recently sat in the cabinet of a G7 country for six years, targets matter. They focus the mind… It gives us something that we can rally around,” he says.

That focus will be needed in Yerevan. When the meeting closes, there will have been

1,411 days since the target was agreed and 1,159 days to go.