Scientific American - OpEd
March 12, 2021
Representative Deb Haaland, who is expected to be sworn in as President Biden’s new secretary of the interior next week, already faces a pressing deadline. Under the wide-ranging executive order on climate change that Biden signed during his first full week in office, the interior secretary has until the end of April to recommend steps that the United States should take “to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.”
The goal of protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030—known as “30 by 30”—is the latest iteration of a longstanding conservation pipe dream, but Biden is not the only world leader now taking it seriously. Thanks in part to a $1 billion campaign funded by Swiss medical technology entrepreneur Hansjörg Wyss and endorsed by the National Geographic Society and the Nature Conservancy, the 30 by 30 goal was formally adopted in January by the newly formed High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, which includes more than 50 countries from six continents. The coalition members, led by the United Kingdom, Costa Rica and France, are urging their fellow signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity to embrace the target, too.