Wednesday October 23, 2024
The Conversation —
The world is gathering in Colombia for the UN biodiversity conference known as Cop16, a biannual pulse-taking of the living planet where actions to protect the natural world are agreed. At its last meeting in 2022, an ambitious roadmap for nature protection was put in place. As part of that Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework, the UN set a bold goal to protect 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030 – known as “30×30” – which was agreed by 196 countries and bodies such as the European Commission.
A key task in Colombia will be to measure progress, and the ocean is in the spotlight. A new report reveals that growth in marine protected areas – designated nature conservation zones that are protected from one or more harmful or damaging human activities – is far too slow to achieve this target. Analysis by conservation experts shows that protected areas are too scattered and unrepresentative.
Efforts to protect marine life lag far behind conservation on land. When 30×30 was agreed, the world had protected roughly 17% of land and 7.8% of the sea. The sea element was already behind previous targets, set in 2010 by the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity to reach 17% and 10% protection of land and sea by 2020.