50 Countries Just Joined New Coalition to Protect 30% of the Planet’s Land and Oceans By Decade’s End

A band of more than 50 countries, chaired by France, the UK, and Costa Rica, have committed to an ambitious push to conserve and protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.

The agreement was made by the fledgling High Ambition Coalition for People and Nature (HAC) at the One Planet Summit for Biodiversity in Paris at the start of this week.

This coalition will now push the ’30×30′ objective at the upcoming meeting of the UN Council on Biodiversity set to meet Kunming, China in May 2021.

The last time that conservation goals like this were made was the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, set down in Japan in 2010, which were largely a failure when the target year of 2020 came around.

This time around, the HAC is hopeful that the diverse coalition of participants, stronger commitments, and prior experience attempting conservation on such a massive scale will increase the chance of what would effectively be a doubling of all protected areas on land, and a quadrupling of that at sea.

While 30% seems like just another arbitrary government figure, The HAC claims that scientific estimates suggest that 30% would be a “necessary interim,” one which would halt species and habitat loss long enough to ensure shorter-term catastrophes are avoided.