CANTERBURY, England — The tally that governments use to track their pledge to conserve 30 percent of the world’s land has been leaving out land that is already being conserved, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday. The authors say the omission makes the target look further off than it is, then warn that closing the gap on paper will not by itself stop species disappearing.
The paper, by Helen O’Neill and colleagues in a team led by the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent, estimates that 26.81 percent of the terrestrial realm sat inside some kind of conservation area in 2022. The official figure is 18.5 percent, taken from the Protected Planet database run by the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, which mostly lists state-run protected areas. The two numbers do not share a date: the study works from 2022 records, the official tally is the current one.
The team gathered two global datasets and 65 national and subnational ones covering 25 countries and territories, about a tenth of the world’s land, and extrapolated. By their count, 15.79 percent is in globally recognised protected areas, 3.64 percent in nationally recognised ones missing from the global list, and 7.38 percent in sites that could qualify as “other effective area-based conservation measures,” which the authors score as possible rather than actual coverage. On that arithmetic the world “may only be 3.2%” short of 30 percent, and they call even that probably an underestimate because some countries cannot map their conservation areas.
The catch is where the extra land sits. Counting every type of site, the authors report in Nature, 51 of the median 173 ecoregions in each sample still had less than 10 percent of their area covered; on globally recognised protected areas alone the count was 80. A protection-equality score, where 1 means every ecoregion gets an equal share, rose only from 0.405 to 0.505. Clinton Jenkins, a conservation ecologist and co-author, said in a Florida International University statement that “simply increasing the number does little to save species from extinction.”
Biodiversity loss continues despite the larger area, the paper notes. Bob Smith, who directs the Durrell Institute and led the research, said in the university’s release that “increasing the area of land under conservation will do little unless these sites are effectively and fairly managed.” Recognition also needs the “free, prior and informed consent” of those who govern each area, some of whom “may be sceptical about the benefits,” the paper says.
What the study does not show is where. The authors give only global totals “to avoid contradicting official country-level reports,” so no outside reader can see which countries or lands make up the difference. Whether governments will put those areas on record, and whether the people who hold them want that, the paper leaves open.
