National Geographic

March 1, 2021
When Grand Canyon National Park was established a century ago, the Colorado River running through it was treated as an afterthought. In the decades following, states scrambled to squeeze every drop of water out of the Colorado for farming and drinking, with a cascade of huge dams constructed along its course.

Native fish like suckers and chubs, found nowhere else in the world, were replaced with invasive catfish and bass that were more attractive for anglers. In time, the mighty river that had once carved out one of America’s most iconic landscapes was reduced to a trickle, no longer able to fulfill its destiny of reaching the sea.

What happened to the Colorado is a powerful example of a river’s decline, but it’s hardly an exception. Around the world, rivers, lakes, and wetlands have increasingly come under similar assault from poorly planned dams, pollution, habitat loss, sand mining, climate change, and the introduction of invasive species.

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National Parks Traveler

February 28, 2021
Tucked inside President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad are three paragraphs calling for recommendations to conserve 30 percent of  U.S. lands and waters by 2030. Scientists have championed the 30x30 initiative globally for years to protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change impacts, but only now is the effort gaining administration attention.

“Over the coming months, Interior will evaluate how to best measure and assess the country’s progress toward the 30x30 goal, to properly account for the many innovative and effective ways that communities are conserving their lands and waters for current and future generations,” according to a Department of the Interior fact sheet issued on January 27.

Calling the goals “the most ambitious conservation agenda in at least the past century,” outdoor industry companies, including Burton, Columbia, L.L. Bean, New Balance, Orvis, Patagonia, The North Face, Keen and Smartwool, co-signed a letter applauding the Biden administration’s 30x30 goal.

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The Wilderness Society

February 24, 2021
On Jan. 27, President Biden launched an effort to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by the year 2030. It’s a big, bold goal, fitting our uniquely perilous moment. Experts say protecting an interconnected network of lands and waters will give us the best chance at curbing the worst effects of climate change; adapting to the shifts already happening; preserving wild nature amid an ongoing extinction crisis; and ensuring communities have access to clean air, water and outdoor spaces.

Below are some key facts and figures to help us wrap our minds around the challenges ahead—and also the rare opportunities now facing us.

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The Guardian

February 22, 2021
When it comes to the environment, few countries rival Costa Rica in terms of action and ambition.

The tiny Central American nation is aiming for total decarbonisation by 2050, not just a “net zero” target. It has regrown large areas of tropical rainforest after suffering some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world in the 1970s and 1980s. Costa Ricans play a major role in international environmental politics, most notably Christiana Figueres, who helped to corral world leaders into agreeing the Paris accord.

Now Costa Rica has turned its attention to securing an ambitious international agreement on halting biodiversity loss. In January, more than 50 countries committed to the protection of 30% of the planet’s land and oceans as part of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People, spearheaded by Costa Rica, which is a co-chair alongside France and the UK.

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Center for American Progress

February 22, 2021
John Podesta addresses the fifth session of the U.N. Environment Assembly to address the interconnected planetary threats to our climate, biodiversity, economy, and human security. He discussed the need to act comprehensively, globally, and immediately to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and coastal seas by 2030 and build partnerships with developing countries to increase bilateral assistance, financing, and debt relief, including debt forgiveness.

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Campaign For Nature

February 19, 2021
Today marks the U.S.’s official reinstatement into the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Biden rejoined hours after his inauguration on January 20, 2021. As the U.S rejoins the world in this historic climate accord, the Campaign for Nature has issued the following statement:

Enric Sala, Explorer in Residence, National Geographic and the author of the award winning book The Nature of Nature, Why We Need the Wild. @enric_sala

“Today marks a new beginning for the U.S. It is an opportunity to reset its ambitions and to reestablish its leadership on the global stage in combating climate change. This move, along with the Biden administration’s signal to set the United States on a path to conserve 30% of the U.S – land and at sea – by 2030 (30x30), demonstrates that the country is prepared to lead on the two largest crises facing our planet.”

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NewScientist

February 17, 2021
We have repeatedly been pressing the snooze button on the issue, but covid-19 has provided perhaps the final wake-up call. “2021 must be the year to reconcile humanity with nature,” said António Guterres, the UN secretary general, in an address to the One Planet Summit of global leaders in Paris last month. “Until now, we have been destroying our planet. We have been abusing it as if we have a spare one.”

The numbers are stark, whichever ones you choose. More than 70 per cent of ice-free land is now under human control and increasingly degraded. The mass of human-made infrastructure exceeds all biomass. Humans and domesticated animals make up more than 90 per cent of the mammalian mass on the planet. Our actions threaten about a million species – 1 in 8 – with extinction (see “Biodiversity: A status report“).

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The Guardian

February 17, 2021
It was an executive order that made waves in environmental circles: after only a week in office, President Joe Biden pledged to preserve 30% of US lands and waters by 2030.

The so-called 30 by 30 conservation goal has already met with bipartisan support in Congress, and it aligns with science-based global preservation targets to reach an eventual target of 50% by 2050.

So which US areas might be at the top of the list? Environmentalists have a few ideas.

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Our Daily Planet

January 29, 2021
In an open letter, 450 elected officials from all around the U.S. support President Biden’s Executive Order action this week to protect 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. The officials hope that the president will lead a swift and aggressive campaign to combat global warming and the extinction crisis through conserving land and ocean spaces for the benefit of nature. Biden has also pledged to reverse a number of the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks, many of which reduced protections for key public lands and infringed on Indigenous sovereignty.

Why This Matters: As this letter makes clear, parks and access to nature are important to Americans across the country – in red and blue states.  During his time in office, Trump rolled back protections for countless public lands, including areas like Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Monuments in Utah, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The rollbacks, meant to clear the way for development, largely failed to attract buyers in Alaska, but fossil fuel companies bought up enough land in the Western U.S. at the end of the Trump administration to continue oil drilling for years.

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Treehugger

January 28, 2021
Earth’s biodiversity is in trouble. A landmark 2019 assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.1 At the same time, human actions have dramatically transformed 75 percent of the Earth’s surface and 66 percent of its ocean ecosystems.

To solve this problem, a group of more than 50 countries have come together under the banner of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People and pledged to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans by 2030. The initiative is being referred to in the media as HAC 30x30.

“Our future depends on preventing the collapse of the natural systems that provide our food, clean water, clean air and stable climate,” Rita El Zaghloul, HAC coordinator at the Ministry of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica, told Treehugger in an email. “In order to preserve these crucial services for our sustainable economies, we must protect enough of the natural world to sustain them.”

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Vox

January 27, 2021
Biden took the next leap in pursuing his climate agenda Wednesday, signing the latest in a spate of environment-focused executive orders. One of the most ambitious goals buried in the order he put forward is to conserve nearly a third of US land and ocean waters by 2030.

Currently, only 12 percent of the country’s land and 26 percent of its oceans are protected, according to a 2018 report by the Center for American Progress. This was achieved by slowly expanding protected areas over the past few decades — until former President Trump took office. In his first year, his administration dramatically shrank two Utah monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — the largest removal of federal land from protection in US history, according to the New York Times. Now the Biden administration will have to quickly reverse course to meet the new goal.

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National Geographic

January 27, 2021
In an executive order issued on January 27 to address the climate crisis, President Joe Biden ordered a pause on new oil and gas leases on public lands and created a White House office of environmental justice. He also quietly committed his administration to an ambitious conservation goal—to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and coastal seas by 2030.

That target, referred to as “30 by 30” by the conservation community, is backed by scientists who argue that reaching it is critical both to fighting climate change and to protecting the estimated one million species at risk of going extinct.

The U.S. is currently conserving around 26 percent of its coastal waters but only about 12 percent of its land in a largely natural state, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

To reach the 30 by 30 target will require conserving an additional area twice the size of Texas, more than 440 million acres, within the next 10 years. The White House has yet to specify who will oversee the initiative at the federal level and which lands and waterways might be prioritized

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Campaign for Nature

January 27, 2021
Today's announcement by President Biden is a win for the people of the United States and the rest of the world, the environment, and the economy. Only by protecting the earth's climate and biodiversity can we truly be on a path to an inclusive and prosperous future for humanity.

 By promising to set the United States on a path to conserve 30% of the U.S by 2030 (30x30) – on land and at sea – President Biden has proposed the most ambitious conservation agenda of any president in American history. Such vision addresses the scale of the challenges facing our climate and the natural world. Only by rapidly accelerating the pace of conservation will we stand a chance to slow the warming of our planet and prevent a climate catastrophe, and to reverse the loss of biodiversity, which many experts have warned is the beginning of a Sixth Mass Extinction and the collapse of humanity’s life support system. 

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The Guardian

January 18, 2021
A coalition of NGOs is calling for an urgent ban on destructive bottom trawling in EU marine protected areas, after the failure of member states to defend seas.

The ban is part of a 10-point action plan to “raise the bar” to achieve biodiversity targets, which they say will not be met by current promises, such as last year’s high-profile pledge by world leaders at the UN summit on biodiversity in New York to reverse nature loss by 2030. 

A raft of EU laws to safeguard marine life – including a duty on EU member states to achieve “good environmental status” in seas by 2020, to achieve healthy ecosystems and to introduce sustainable fisheries management – have not been enforced, says the group, which includes Oceana in Europe, Greenpeace and ClientEarth.

They warn that this failure, combined with existing pressures on Europe’s seas, including climate change, risks triggering irreversible changes to the ecological conditions under which humanity has evolved and thrived.

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China Daily

January 18, 2021
Analysts said the commitment by China and some 50 other countries to protect 30 percent of the earth's land and oceans by 2030 was a much-needed step to halt biodiversity loss and prevent species extinction.

Realizing the mission, though, will not be easy as the new goal would mean a huge scale-up in protected land and ocean area compared to current levels.

The new commitment by 50-odd countries is "very positive and very much needed to address the linked global crisis we are facing on climate change and biodiversity loss", said Bruce Dunn, director of environment and safeguards at the Manila based Asian Development Bank's sustainable development and climate change department.

"Realizing this ambition will be challenging, however, because it means doubling the existing land area protected, and more than tripling the area of protected oceans," Dunn said.

"Protection also implies sustainable management and sustainable financing, which has been a big challenge with the existing estate of protected areas."

China was among a group of more than 50 countries that pledged to protect the planet's land and sea area by 2030 as part of efforts to stop plants and animals from becoming extinct and address climate change issues.

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