Reuters

May 19, 2021
Germany helped launch a new billion-dollar fund on Wednesday to tackle rapidly depleting global biodiversity, as countries missed key land and marine conservation targets but prepare to ramp up efforts in the decade ahead.

Protecting biodiversity has risen up the global agenda, not least because scientists say the destruction of remote natural habitats facilitates the spread of diseases such as the new coronavirus to humans as they come into closer contact with other species.

The United Nations hopes to secure an agreement at the next Biodiversity Convention meeting in China in October to protect and conserve 30% of the Earth's land and water by 2030.

"The concept of '30 by 30' is quite a big political ask, but we need these kinds of targets because they are a perfect way to harness political will," said James Hardcastle, a conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), referring to the campaign by its tagline.

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Campaign For Nature

May 19, 2021
Today, the United Nations and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) launched a final report card on progress towards Aichi Target 11 – the global 10-year target on protected and conserved areas that expired in 2020. 

The report finds that the size of protected areas has grown significantly, with the 17% target for land-based conservation and the 10% goal for ocean conservation nearly met. This progress demonstrates the ability of protected area targets to help drive action from countries around the world, and the report authors make it clear that more protections are needed moving forward in order to help address the crisis of global biodiversity loss. They note that there are still many areas important for biodiversity and ecosystem services that lack protection, and they highlight that the entire network of protected and conserved areas must be more effectively managed.  

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Native News Online

May 9, 2021
The Biden administration on Thursday released its vision for how the United States can work collaboratively to conserve and restore the lands, waters, and wildlife that support and sustain the nation. A number of tribal leaders were quick to endorse the principles of the 30x30 Policy in a statement also released on Thursday. 

The recommendations are contained in the 22-page “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful” report, outlining a locally led and voluntary nationwide conservation goal to conserve 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030 that was submitted to the National Climate Task Force.

Dubbed the 30x30 Policy, the recommendations were developed by the U.S. Departments of the Interior, Agriculture and Commerce, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

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The Highland County Press

May 8, 2021
The Biden administration plans to broadly define conservation and encourage private landowners to adopt sustainable practices to meet a goal of protecting 30 percent of the land and water in the U.S. by 2030, according to a multi-agency report published Thursday.

The recommendations are short of the most aggressive federal directives congressional Republicans feared would be central to reaching the administration’s “30 by 30” goal, but may still spark objections in a Congress deeply split on how the government should manage its public lands and deal with private landowners, particularly in the West.

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PolitiFact

May 7, 2021
As part of his plan to put the brakes on climate change, President Joe Biden set a goal of conserving 30% of America’s land and waters by 2030. For land in particular, that’s a heavy lift — only about 12% of the nation’s land is now under some form of protection.

Biden’s target is part of a larger international ambition to protect a third of the world’s land and waters by 2030. On a global scale, the protected regions would do a lot of work to pull carbon from the air and store it in the soil, coral reefs, sea grasses and other carbon sinks. The effort goes under name 30 by 30, or 30x30.

But some advocates for indigenous peoples see a threat in the international push to protect land.

One of those groups, Survival International, calls the global 30x30 plan "the biggest land grab in history." We dug in to see where that figure comes from, and whether it represents a reasonable estimate of the likely harm due to the 30x30 plan.

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Wall Street Journal

May 6, 2021
The Biden administration wants to preserve wildlife habitats by expanding collaboration with private landowners and state and local governments, with less emphasis on putting more land under federal protection, according to a report issued Thursday.

The report, “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful,” provides a preliminary outline of how the administration can pursue a goal President Biden has set to conserve 30% of the country’s land and water by 2030.

Mr. Biden adopted the 30% target from scientists and environmentalists who say it can help stem animal and plant extinctions, threats to water and food supplies and other environmental crises.

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Campaign For Nature

May 6, 2021
Today the Biden administration released its “America the Beautiful” report. The report lays out guidance for the implementation of the administration’s ambitious plan to protect 30% of the U.S.’s land and sea by 2030.

It provides a vision for a first-of-its-kind decade-long, locally led nationwide effort across public, private, and Tribal lands and waters to restore and conserve America’s lands, waters, and wildlife buoyed by federal support. The report made clear that private land conservation efforts will be voluntary.  

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Campaign For Nature

April 27, 2021
Last week, at Biden’s Earth Day Summit, world leaders made bold and sweeping pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions—a critical step toward achieving the Paris climate agreement. At the same time, heads of state from France, the U.K., Germany, Gabon and Costa Rica, among others speaking at the Summit, made the powerful case that we can’t solve the climate crisis without tackling the biodiversity crisis. 

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The Wilderness Society

April 22, 2021
The Biden administration’s Climate Summit started today with a bang: The president pledged to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions almost in half by 2030. The plan is ambitious but critical as the climate crisis gets progressively worse, with 2020 ranking as one of the hottest years on record. As we aim to reach this goal, a vital part of the strategy should be to implement nature-based solutions on public lands.

For centuries, humans have been burning fossil fuels to power our lives. This process has released an excessive amount of gases into the atmosphere that are heating up the planet. We’re now living with the consequences, including more severe and frequent wildfires, floods, hurricanes and droughts.

There’s no easy way out of this crisis. We need to dramatically reduce climate change emissions coming from cars, trucks, power plants, and other sources. But that’s not enough. To be successful, we must eliminate carbon emissions that are already lingering in the air, not to mention ensure humans and wildlife can adapt to the climate change impacts knocking on our doors. Nature-based solutions, such as protecting and expanding wildlands can help.

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Marine Conservation Institute

April 22, 2021
Today, a little after 8:00 am eastern and before dozens of world leaders participating in the Leader’s Summit on Climate, President Biden set bold greenhouse gas emission reductions for the United States—cutting 2005 emission levels in half by 2030— as US policy. He said in part, “…the US sets out on the road to cut greenhouse gases in half by the end of this decade”.

In less than 100 days, the President has reentered the Paris Climate Accords and proposed groundbreaking legislation (American Jobs Plan) that would make very large investments in clean energy, energy conservation and coastal resilience and restoration*. Contributing to the steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, ocean-based climate solutions like offshore wind, restoring carbon removal ecosystems like marshes and seagrass beds, eliminating bottom trawling from marine sanctuaries and establishing new marine protected areas could play a significant role.

Dr. Lance Morgan, President of Marine Conservation Institute, praised President Biden for his high climate change ambition, and said, “It is so exciting to see the President taking urgently needed action and leading on climate change. The administration recognizes that US commitments to the Paris Climate Accords must include ocean-based solutions and supports the conservation of 30% of our lands and waters which will also address climate change and future resiliency.”

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The Guardian

April 15, 2021
Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests.

These fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara. Invasive alien species including cats, foxes, rabbits, goats and camels have had a major impact on native species in Australia, with the study finding no intact areas left.

The researchers suggest reintroducing a small number of important species to some damaged areas, such as elephants or wolves – a move that could restore up to 20% of the world’s land to ecological intactness.

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The Hill - OpEd

April 12, 2021
The Biden administration will soon release its strategy for the recent executive order to conserve at least 30 percent of the nation’s lands and oceans by 2030.  

Like the previously introduced Senate Resolution 372 and House Resolution 835, the 30x30 initiative aligns with recommendations from the scientific and environmental communities to protect 30 to 50 percent of the planet. The initiative can meaningfully increase the quality and quantity of natural areas in the U.S., considering only 12 percent of the roughly 28 percent of federal lands are permanently protected from development and other intensive use.  

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World Politics Review

April 12, 2021
Over the past two years, an extraordinary global campaign has emerged to protect 30 percent of Earth’s total surface from human exploitation by 2030. The members of this so-called 30x30 coalition, which now includes scores of governments, understand that climate change is only one half of the planet’s environmental crisis. The Paris Agreement, while imperative to curb greenhouse gas emissions, will do little by itself to save the planet’s collapsing biodiversity or preserve the massive ecosystems upon which humanity depends—and which we are fast degrading.

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Los Angeles Times - OpEd

April 11, 2021
The frequency of natural disasters has soared in recent decades. Total damage topped $210 billion worldwide in 2020. With climate change, the costs attributed to coastal storms will increase dramatically.

At the same time, coastal habitats such as wetlands and reefs are being lost rapidly. Some 20% of the world’s mangroves were lost over the last four decades. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef was degraded by bleaching in 2020 alone. In California, we have lost more than 90% of our coastal marshes.

Coastal habitats serve as a critical first line of defense, and their loss puts communities at even greater risk from coastal flooding. Coral reefs work as natural breakwaters and reduce flooding by breaking waves offshore. Wetlands such as marshes and mangroves protect coastlines by dampening storm surge and waves; they also prevent erosion and can build new land.

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Mongabay

March 26, 2021
From the eye of a satellite, the ocean is streaked with smoky white lines that flow and twist like scribbled handwriting across the surface. But these lines aren’t naturally occurring features — they’re sediment plumes from large trawling vessels that scrape the seafloor with nets and heavy equipment, trying to catch bottom-dwelling species like shrimp and whiting.

The environmental consequences of trawling are still being investigated since the plumes were first noticed in satellite imagery in 2008. But a new study in Nature suggests that it churns up and releases carbon that’s been locked up inside sediment at the bottom of the ocean — between about 600 million and 1,500 million tons, according to the study’s initial estimates, which is about the same amount as the global aviation industry.

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