One Year In, the Wyss Campaign for Nature Makes Progress Towards Protecting 30% of the Planet by 2030
Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve and Territorial Protected Area | Photo credit: Pat Kane courtesy of Nature United
The Wyss Campaign for Nature was launched one year ago by Hansjörg Wyss – founder and chairman of the Wyss Foundation – with a $1 billion, 10-year philanthropic commitment to help, as he’s stated, urgently narrow the “enormous gap between how little of our natural world is currently protected and how much should be protected...before our human footprint consumes the earth’s remaining wild places.”
At the campaign’s launch, Wyss laid out two overarching goals to begin addressing the nature crisis. First, he said that the global community must immediately accelerate the pace of land and ocean protections through direct investments into place-based conservation initiatives around the world. And second, everyone – from the grassroots up – must push for an ambitious agenda for nature when nations meet in 2020 at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity meetings in China, including a commitment by all nations to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s lands and oceans by 2030 and to provide critical financial support to manage protected areas.
Over the last year, the Wyss Campaign for Nature and our partners around the world have begun working to fulfill the campaign’s promise. In the last year alone, the Wyss Campaign for Nature has helped to facilitate permanent protections for nearly 15 million acres of land and more than 161,500 square kilometers of oceans. Thanks, in part, to the place-based conservation successes in the past twelve months, Wyss philanthropy has now helped protect more than 50 million acres of land in the last two decades. That is an area equal in size to 23.5 Yellowstone National Parks or slightly smaller than the country of Romania.
In North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and Africa, the Wyss Campaign for Nature, alongside local partners, is proactively creating new national and regional parks, indigenous protected areas, wildlife refuges, and marine protected areas. In Canada, for example, the Wyss Campaign for Nature has supported the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation who, working alongside the Canadian federal government and the Government of the Northwest Territories, formally established the 5.7 million acre Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve and Territorial Protected Area earlier this year.
The newly designated park represents the largest protected area ever facilitated through Wyss philanthropy. Support from the Wyss Campaign for Nature to the The Nature Conservancy – and their Canadian affiliate, Nature United – is helping the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation establish a co-management fund for Thaidene Nene National Park Reserve. These resources – totalling $6.5 million CAD – along with matching funds from other private philanthropy and the Canadian federal government, will provide a sustained source of funding to guarantee the Łutsël K’é Dene have the long-term resources and capacity to fully co-manage their traditional homeland alongside Parks Canada and the Government of the Northwest Territories.
In Argentina, the Wyss Campaign for Nature has partnered with Fundación Flora Y Fauna Argentina to permanently protect ecologically diverse lands inside the newly established Aconquija National Park. Wyss philanthropy provided $14.6 million in funding in 2018 and 2019 to purchase five properties within the park’s boundaries from willing sellers and permanently protect 82,500 acres. And discussions are already underway about expanding Aconquija National Park in the near future.
These projects are just two of many community-led conservation initiatives that have reached successful milestones in the past year. For example, the Wyss Campaign for Nature, alongside local partners, helped retire oil leases inside Montana’s Badger-Two Medicine region, a place of deep cultural and spiritual significance to the Blackfeet Nation. The campaign helped guarantee permanent, public access along – what had been – the longest stretch of private lands on the Pacific Crest Trail. Working alongside our partners in the Andes Amazon region, the campaign has helped establish new protected areas covering more than 6.1 million acres in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru over the previous year. And, in Zimbabwe, the Wyss Campaign for Nature has partnered with Gonarezhou Conservation Trust to continue improving management of Gonarezhou National Park, protecting and bolstering the populations of elephant and other wildlife.
Place-Based Conservation Success Stories
Meanwhile, the international community has begun making steady progress towards establishing an ambitious plan to safeguard nature and turn the tide on biodiversity loss when nations meet next year in Kunming, China at the 2020 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meetings. There, policy-leaders will be charged with updating a decadal global strategic plan for biodiversity, which was last updated in 2010.
The 2010 plan established the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, which included a goal for nations to protect 17 percent of the planet’s lands and 10 percent of its oceans by 2020. All indications are that the global community will meet the percentage targets, but scientists are raising alarm bells that nations must set much more ambitious goals for nature conservation if we are to significantly slow extinction rates and sustain the various benefits nature provides to communities and economies – including the provision of water for drinking and irrigation, the pollination of crops that feed billions of people, and supplying a cost-effective carbon sink to mitigate climate change.
A growing coalition of scientists, national governments, NGOs, and individuals are backing a proposal for the more than 190 parties who will meet in China at the CBD meetings to adopt the goal of protecting at least 30 percent of the planet’s lands and oceans by 2030, en route to protecting 50 percent by 2050. The scientific community has coalesced around the goal of protecting 30 percent of the planet as a necessary interim step towards guaranteeing half the Earth is managed as parks and natural areas. Nearly 3 million people in 92 countries and more than 135 organizations support the 30x30 goals.
What’s more, policy-leaders and nations are increasingly supporting the effort to protect at least 30 percent of the planet in the next decade and to mobilize the financial resources necessary to properly manage protected natural areas. In early October 2019 environment ministers from five countries – France, Gabon, Grenada, Finland, and England – joined Costa Rica in its initiative to promote a high ambition coalition committed to protecting 30% of the planet's lands and oceans by 2030. The UAE, the Seychelles, Monaco, Cameroon, and Mozambique also support the initiative.
Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, Costa Rica’s Minister of Environment and Energy, summed up the need:
“The threat of a sixth mass extinction makes this level of commitment necessary. The case of Costa Rica shows that it is possible to have healthy ecosystems, rich agricultural systems and strong economies living side by side.”
The growing list of countries supporting efforts to protect 30 percent of the planet also includes Rwanda, Colombia, Uganda, and Canada. Fiji, Belize, Kenya, Vanuatu, Portugal, Palau, Belgium, Federated States of Micronesia, and Niue have all endorsed a goal of protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans.
Beyond the initial and encouraging progress that is being made, there’s still a great deal of work to do in advance of next year’s CBD meetings. More than 190 nations must unanimously agree to adopt the 30x30 goals as part of the updated strategic plan for biodiversity – no small feat. But the conditions are certainly in place: science shows we have only a short period of time to act before it is too late, while public opinion surveys show that the global public supports efforts to protect far more of the planet by wide margins.
For our part, the Wyss Campaign for Nature will continue to do whatever we can to help safeguard Earth’s wildlife and wild places, as Hansjörg Wyss says, “By the people, for the people, and for all time.