Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about ‘30x30’. The US president, Joe Biden, recently committed the country to protecting 30% of its lands and waters by 2030. At the next meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity, world leaders are widely expected to embrace a global 30x30 target for conservation. These moves are in line with a larger community of scientists who have been calling for 30% of the earth’s lands and waters to be protected by 2030, and 50% by 2050, in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
At first glance, 30x30 seems like a winning proposition. Protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves, currently hold about 12% of global land-carbon stocks (at present, about 15% of global land area and 7% of global marine area is protected). Protected areas act as refuges for biodiversity, protecting many of the planet’s most endangered species. Conserved lands also provide a number of other important socioecological benefits, from flood mitigation to heat reduction to cultural meaning.
What the millions of annual visitors to protected areas may not realize, however, is that conservation has come at a cost. Conserved lands are often presented as untouched wildernesses – places unsullied by human occupation and influence. In almost every case, this is a profound mischaracterization. Most of the places we now call national parks, game reserves, and national monuments were once occupied and managed by humans (sometimes until very recently). As historian Mark Spence put it over two decades ago, an untouched wilderness needed to be created before it could be protected. That is, millions of people have been dispossessed in the name of conservation. 30x30 threatens to dispossess many more.
