The world is closer to a major conservation target than scientists thought

Mariana Lennaro (0:06)

Why is it black so far?

Dan Fox (0:08)

Like, it sounds so simple.

Nick Howe (0:09)

They had no idea.

Benjamin Thompson (0:10)

But now the data's...

SPEAKER_5 (0:12)

I find this not only refreshing, but at some level astounding.

Nick Howe (0:23)

Welcome back to The Nature Podcast. This week, how the world's conservation areas may be undercounted.

Benjamin Thompson (0:30)

And what AI is revealing about brown fat. I'm Benjamin Thompson.

Nick Howe (0:36)

And I'm Nick Petruchow.

Putting aside land where animals and plants can thrive is a key way to conserve them. These areas can protect fragile ecosystems and help rare species thrive. And because of this, nations have agreed to turn 30% of land into conservation areas by 2030 If you look up the official statistics on how close we are to that, you will find that current data suggests that the total area is only 18.5%, quite a way to go in the next four years.

According to new research, though, humanity may be much closer to that 30 by 30 goal than current data suggests. But even if we're closer than we thought, it may not actually solve all the issues that biodiversity is facing. To take us through the statistics, I caught up with one of the authors of the new research in Nature, Bob Smith, who told me why it was that he suspected that the official numbers were off.

Bob Smith (1:42)

So a big part of it actually comes from doing fieldwork and knowing that the official data can sometimes be a bit different to what's happening on the ground, especially as there's a new type of conservation area called an OECN, which stands for Other Effective Area Based Conservation Measures, where they're managed in a way that they have conservation benefits, but where conservation isn't necessarily the primary management objective. So the most famous of those are areas often in the rainforest, governed and managed by indigenous peoples who live there, farm there, but to them, it's important to manage the land in a way that maintains the rainforest or the other habitats so that they're really important for biodiversity as one. So in the past, there was a real focus on protected areas, which are often run and managed by the government. But as part of meeting this 30 by 30 target, there's a big push to start broadening out the types of conservation areas that should be internationally recognized and included in these reporting. And so this analysis involved talking to our colleagues in a set of countries to say, basically, please send us all your data, send us the data that you have on those conservation areas that at the moment isn't recognized internationally.

Together, we'll go through it and work out which of those sites could count as one of these OECMs, and that will eventually count towards 30 by 30 target.

Nick Howe (3:06)

And was it as simple as, well, I say simple, was it as straightforward as asking everyone for their data and then compiling it together? How did you actually come up with a new estimate?

Bob Smith (3:17)

Yes, I mean, actually the analysis itself is pretty simple. You know, we chose a representative sample of countries, 25 countries and territories that cover 10% of the land, and we just contacted all those people to bring the data together.

Contacting those people, getting the data, cleaning it up, combining it, took ages. Tracking down people who might have data on particular datasets. I mean, almost certainly, there are other datasets out there that we didn't get hold of. It really was a case of going through different networks and finding people. So there's almost certainly gaps there as well. But once we had the data, it was relatively straightforward just to do spatial analysis, adding that up together, and just assuming, because our 10% sample is representative, that we can extrapolate to the whole world based on the 10% sample.

Nick Howe (4:07)

And when you compiled all this data, what did you get for the estimate of the areas of the world that are under conservation?

Bob Smith (4:14)

So we looked at three categories, and actually one of the things that we wanted to do was use the official data. So we had what we called globally recognized protected areas. So those are the existing ones. Then we have nationally recognized protected areas, because in some countries, there are still government protected areas or private protected areas that are recognized at the national level, but that don't meet the global definition of what a protected area should be. And we thought those are actually likely to count as these OECMs, this other type of conservation area. And then we looked at what we called possible OECMs. So these are the sites that we think meet the OECM definition that haven't gone through that official recognition process.