Freddie Baseman
Contributing Writer
On Oct. 14, Bren School of Environment’s assistant professor Ruth Oliver moderated a panel discussion on the 30×30 Initiative, an internationally agreed-upon mission to protect 30 percent of Earth’s terrestrial and aquatic areas by the year 2030.
The initiative was adopted in 2022, following the 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Parties (commonly shortened to COP15), and is only one of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 23 targets.
There are many questions surrounding the implementation of 30×30, including how progress is, or should be, measured and monitored. Broader economic concerns and individual consequences, such as displacement or loss of work, should also be addressed in any serious discussion surrounding sustainability and what success actually looks like.
Universal beneficiality is a popular point of contention. Does mitigating the impacts of climate change and creating and enforcing conservation-centered laws, affect everyone positively, and on what timeline? This is in essence a question of human livelihood, and how it coexists with broader conservation efforts. Even if it is agreed upon, generally, that addressing the current environmental crises and implementing sustainability efforts will benefit people around the world, there is no guarantee that “[securing] a public good,” as Bren professor Chris Costello put it during the panel discussion, will be in everybody’s immediate best interest. On a smaller, localized level, these global boundaries could be an impediment, or a burden, due to the potentially vast economic costs and restructuring.
However, panel member Millie Chapman, a postdoctoral student at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), offered another perspective, discussing the localized benefits of conservation efforts and increased or maintained biodiversity, such as heat mitigation or resilience to extreme weather events.
This topic spotlights the controversy inherent in discussions of conservation. In California, even forming a definition of conservation was an arduous process that took, according to Chapman “thousands … of hours of public engagement and workshops.” Central to this issue of controversy is the history of conservation, which is inherently a history of colonialism as well. Discussions are finally being had about the incorporation of Indigenous people’s land into the broader dialogue of the history and impact of conservation, and into the 30×30 Initiative. Instantiating this general shift is the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary off the central California coast, which recently became the first-ever tribal-proposed marine sanctuary. It is co-stewarded by the Chumash people and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
While we now have conservation targets in place, thanks to the 30×30 Initiative, how can we reach them? Costello raised the idea of trade. If the goal is conservation or restoration of 30 percent of the land and 30 percent of the sea, countries will inevitably have unequal burdens, and inequitable access to necessary resources. These “heterogeneous values,” according to Costello, could be lessened through a conservation market. For example, northern countries, whose economies include large fisheries, could offload their conservation targets onto tropical southern countries, paying them in the process. Therefore, the southern countries are being paid for their conservation efforts, and the northern countries can keep their fisheries. Ideally, everybody benefits.
Of course, there is also the question of how percentage values of measurement can ever be equated, a question that Bren professor and NCEAS director Ben Halpern raised during the panel. There is no system of equivalency here, a problem that applies inside the realm of trade as well as outside it.
Another rising problem: where do we save? Though it’s cheaper to protect non-threatened areas, should our efforts be focused there? This question could be answered, at least in part, by further research. Chapman, however, brought an important secondary question, further nuancing the discussion: Could more data be, at certain points, a bad thing? Right now the amount and intensity of environmental research is unequal across countries, often because of, as Chapman put it, “the disparities in resources and “scientific infrastructure.” The surveillance and policing often inherent in environmental research has impacts, of course, and the invasiveness of answering these questions must be seriously considered as we move forward.
One last consideration highlights what happens after countries do take conservation measures, such as establishing protected areas. For example, establishing a marine protected area (MPA) might lead to decreased fishing in that particular area, but it could also lead to increased fishing in surrounding waters to make up for that limitation. With this concern in mind, EMLab Senior Project Scientist and panelist Gavin McDonald discussed an example to the contrary. Taiwanese fishing in Palau, before the establishment of an MPA, was relatively big — after the MPA was established, however, Taiwan largely stopped fishing not only in the protected area, but in the whole of the exclusive economic zone, because it ceased to be profitable. This is likely the result of reduced access to productive fishing grounds, which forced boats to go further out, spending more money to catch the same amount of fish as they did prior to the MPA. These negative effects on people and their livelihoods and on nations’ economies contribute to degazettement, or the loss of protected status for an area. Protected areas are central to climate change mitigation and combating the biodiversity crisis, and removing them is a blow to these efforts and a setback to a very time-sensitive movement.
With the complexities surrounding the 30×30 Initiative, panel members argued for a multifaceted response to the environmental problems we have today and expressed optimism towards the development and implementation of the 30×30 Initiative as one of many ways we can address the climate and biodiversity crises affecting people on a global scale.