The costs of global protected-area expansion (Target 3 of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework) may fall more heavily on lower-income countries

Abstract

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for global environmental agreements is how higher-income and lower-income countries share the costs of implementing them. This problem has become particularly acute as biodiversity and climate ambitions have increased across recent COPs (Conferences of Parties). Here, we estimate the likely distribution of costs for one of the most ambitious proposals: draft Target 3 of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which would increase coverage of protected and conserved areas (PCAs) to 30% of global land and sea area - more than triple the current value. Since the GBF does not specify where new PCAs would be placed, we use three scenarios of how Target 3 might be implemented, cost those scenarios, and then compare the mean distribution of costs across World Bank income groups. We find that in relative terms, lower-income countries could face considerably larger financial burdens than high-income countries, even though the benefits of conservation are disproportionately enjoyed by high-income countries. Lower-income countries would also face larger increases in the amount of land or sea under conservation, implying higher opportunity and establishment costs. Resolving this potential cost-sharing inequity may be a key requirement to achieve consensus on draft Target 3, and indeed on ambitious environmental proposals more generally.

NGO-Led Community-Based Conservation: A New Frontier of Territorialization with Implications for Pastoralists’ Land Tenure and Climate Change Adaptation

“…This results in physical or institutional enclosures that curtail access to initial resource users and inhabitants [42,45]. The arguments that local communities are inherently destructive and therefore ought to be separated from nature [7], and that ecosystems can and should pay their way to conservation [91], inform such boundary-making processes [42]. In recent years, such ideas have influenced ambitious conservation projects, including efforts to put 30% of global (but mainly developing countries') land under conservation by 2030 [27,92].…”

“…At the same time, however, this has had a significant impact on conservation efforts around the world, often resulting in negative consequences for local communities and the environment. Several researchers contend that this occurs because the neoliberal policies and practices within which such practices are anchored prioritize economic growth and private ownership over conservation and community well-being [42,43,91,93,94].…”

Social considerations are crucial to success in implementing the 30×30 global conservation target

“…However, at present there are only limited assessments of the socialecological implications of expanding area-based conservation to 30x30 under different implementation scenarios. Existing studies have investigated the number of people currently living in areas that could be included in scaled-up area-based conservation sites 6,7 , the potential impacts of losing agricultural land to conservation 8 , the uneven distribution of costs of implementing 30x30 between economically richer and poorer countries 9 , and which areas are critical for delivering benefits to people 2 . These are important contributions, but decision-makers at all levels will require much more detailed analysis scrutinising the short-and long-term implications of different implementation scenarios (what, where, how) for specific groups of local people (disaggregated by poverty status, livelihoods, gender, vulnerability and other factors).…”

Linking small‐scale fisheries co‐management to U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

“…Permanent closures (Figure 3 ), including no‐take reserves that may be situated within marine protected areas (MPAs) and locally managed marine areas, are employed for fisheries management and marine conservation worldwide (Edgar et al., 2014 ; Pressey et al., 2015 ; Waldron et al., 2020 ) and are thus the most visible, although not the most common, co‐management strategy in the South Pacific region. Most studies quantifying fisheries co‐management impacts in the South Pacific have correspondingly assessed changes associated with permanent closures.…”