How the Bezos Earth Fund is Supporting the Boldest Conservation Idea Ever Proposed

Protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water by the year 2030: that’s the intent of the 30x30 goal. It’s a straightforward shorthand for a wildly complex and ambitious endeavor.

Preserving land and water sustains the life that depends on it. Safeguard enough and we just might secure the biodiversity that embodies and enriches the world’s ecosystems and sustains all life on Earth. No other conservation effort has set a goal as audacious as 30x30.

The Bezos Earth Fund has offered major support for 30x30, making an initial one-billion-dollar pledge in 2021. Then, the Earth Fund joined forces with ten other donors to launch the Protecting Our Planet Challenge, a five-billion-dollar pledge for nature. Says the Earth Fund’s Managing Director and Leader of Nature Solutions Dr. Cristián Samper: “We wanted to send a clear signal that reaching such an ambitious goal requires us to work together. It’s a challenge bigger than any one nation or institution.”

To maximize impact, the Earth Fund aims to do more than just increase the size of the areas under protection. It also prioritizes places with the greatest biodiversity and the most significant threats. Good management and durable, local, coalition-led support for protected areas are paramount concerns. “We have also made securing tenure rights for Indigenous and communal territories a core part of our strategy,” Samper notes.

A Tailored Approach

While efforts to promote the 30x30 benchmark have been in the works for years, 2022 saw a major boost. In that year, the goal was explicitly adopted by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty that commits its 196 parties to preserving the richness of life on Earth. Today, thanks to efforts before and since the UN action, at least 270,000 designated areas protect more than 17 percent of our planet’s land and eight percent of its oceans. The statistics are significant, but to be effective, the work must go beyond just numbers. 

“You often start by increasing the pie – the number of hectares,” explains Patricia León, Associate Director for Nature Conservation at the Earth Fund, “but we are also keen to set up effective and durable protection.” That is true for both new and previously designated areas. Successful enforcement, local buy-in and science-driven management are the difference between offering real protection and creating “paper parks” without real impact, León adds.

Creation and maintenance of protected areas calls for deep engagement with partners, and exploring the use of new technologies and approaches can improve effectiveness. Success won’t come from a pre-determined, cookie-cutter approach. It requires listening and taking cues from those closest to the resources.

Fortunately, there are many classifications that help protect biodiversity. These include regional and local designated areas, Indigenous territories managed for conservation, and what are known as “other effective area-based conservation measures” (OECMs), which conserve biodiversity even though that’s not their main priority. For example, a sacred religious site home to many species could be one. In other words, says León, “National parks are not the only form of protection.”

The Earth Fund supports using traditional knowledge and science to establish, manage, and govern protected areas and OECMs. Context matters as well, since protected areas that are representative and well-connected maximize conservation benefits. Most importantly, these efforts must recognize and respect the rights and contributions of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to biodiversity conservation.

“The Most Important 30x30”

The goal is to protect life, not barren ground or empty seas. That means protecting the places of highest conservation value, especially those where threats are greatest.

When the UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted 30x30, they prioritized “areas of importance to biodiversity.” A group of 13 international conservation organizations have developed a science-based global standard for Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) as a tool for identifying such areas. With support from the Earth Fund, this coalition is moving at a quick pace, reviewing hundreds of locations a year to identify, map, and monitor the most important places on the planet for biodiversity.

“We focus on the most important 30x30,” says Padu Franco, the Earth Fund’s Program Manager for the Tropical Andes. And this requires the expertise and engagement of actors from all segments of society.

So far, 27 countries have created KBA National Coordination Groups to complete surveys of their vital biodiversity areas. These groups involve a diverse set of scientists and advisors and local experts. The KBA criteria, which are centered on the intersection of biodiversity, geography, ecology, and scarcity, will help guide countries to preserve the most important 30 percent of their land and marine areas.

Spotlight on the Andes and the Congo

Countries in the Andes and the Congo Basin have been particularly active in assessing their KBAs with Earth Fund support. The Earth Fund has invested in supercharging assessment efforts across the tropical Andes (in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru) and in the Congo Basin (in Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Republic of Congo).

More than 600 experts from 129 institutions worked for two years under the guidance of the KBA partnership. One Earth Fund grant facilitated the comprehensive review of every existing KBA in these countries and identified many new ones, adding a total of 651 sites to the global database of KBAs in a single year.

The inventories include areas vital to many iconic creatures as well as lesser-known animals and plant species that support overall ecological health. This means jaguars, frogs, orchids, and condors in the tropical Andes, which is home to more than 15 percent of the world’s known plant and bird species. The Congo Basin hosts three-quarters of Africa’s remaining tropical forests and one in five living terrestrial species on Earth, including elephants, gorillas, and the elusive Okapi. 

Investments from the Earth Fund have also helped establish more than 1.6 million hectares of newly protected areas in the Andes and supported management plans and Indigenous life plans there. In the Congo Basin, the Earth Fund supported the creation of 84 community biodiversity conservation areas across the region and a new marine protected area in the Republic of Congo.

Other important efforts supported by the Earth Fund are underway in Brazil, the Western and Central Pacific, North America, and the Eastern Tropical Pacific.

Collaboration Across Borders in the Eastern Pacific

Just as essential ecosystems depend on biodiversity, the coalitions prioritized by the Earth Fund represent groups essential to the success of these efforts. The Earth Fund prioritizes projects with political and financial support coming from local communities, governments, and NGOs. Program leaders nurture political commitments by convening regional meetings to keep biodiversity front and center amid shifting politics and priorities.

One of the most ambitious of these collaborations is active in a pocket of the Pacific framed by Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador. This region is home to the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (also known by the Spanish language acronym CMAR). The Presidents of the four countries met at COP26 in Glasgow and committed to 30x30 in the region, and the Earth Fund is supporting dramatic expansion and improved management of this regional ocean treasure. 

Along with other donors and local partners, the Earth Fund is working to establish the largest transnational Marine Biosphere Reserve in the world, including ten marine protected areas. Fed by major, converging ocean currents, this region’s biodiversity and global significance has been recognized by scientists, conservation groups, governments, and international entities.

It is a crucial habitat for iconic, threatened, and restricted-range species, including sharks, whales, rays, marine mammals, reptiles, bony fish, seabirds, and invertebrates. Tuna and other commercially important pelagic fish with ranges across the Pacific also depend on these waters.

The biodiversity of the region is important for its own sake, and for the sake of the millions of dollars the region provides in economic activities. Industrial fishing fleets – and millions of people in coastal communities – rely on these resources for food and income. But a healthy ocean ecosystem also is more resilient to climate change, which has benefits well beyond the region.

Investments by the Earth Fund have built on existing commitments to protect biodiversity hotspots in the region. Over two years of coordinated work, these four countries (Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador) more than tripled the overall area under protection, now spanning more than 630,000 square kilometers (an area larger than California).

The corridor connects new and existing protected areas surrounding the Malpelo, Coiba, Cocos, and Galapagos Islands. This remarkable achievement was the result of 15 years of scientific survey work and dedicated political champions in all four countries. A network of donors convened by the Earth Fund has underpinned this effort by committing to contribute $150 million over five years, $120 million of which has already been deployed.

With the expansion of CMAR, Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica have each protected more than 30 percent of the ocean where they have jurisdiction over natural resources (areas known as Exclusive Economic Zones, or EEZs).

Ecuador has also now protected 19 percent of the waters within its EEZ, including the Galapagos Marine Reserve, which is the largest existing area of protected waters in the corridor. This group of islands is an ecological marvel – the dense speciation here was the backdrop for Charles Darwin’s seminal work on biodiversity, On the Origin of Species. Through innovative financing and enforcement efforts, the Earth Fund and its partners are working to see that this area can also ensure the longevity of species.

Eyes on the Ocean

It’s one thing to draw lines on a map of the ocean, but another thing altogether to actively protect open waters. The work is difficult and expensive. The Earth Fund partners with organizations such as Global Fishing Watch, Wild Aid, and the Joint Analytical Cell, which are making the most of technology and transparency to identify threats and violators of protected waters.

The Earth Fund is supporting the use of technology and training for the rangers who need to interpret and act on the information. Historical data will help them know where the threats are most likely in a given season so they can plan where and when to deploy their resources. “Instead of patrolling all this area, you can start prioritizing your limited dollars, time, and capacity,” says León.

The different types of technologies also help managers of protected areas identify suspicious activity in real time, such as when vessels abuse their permission to pass through a protected area but exhibit tell-tale signs of illegal fishing. Should a ship with a right to transit begin circling and lingering, for example, then park rangers monitoring the system can be alerted and intervene.

Indigenous and Local Leadership

Elevating the efforts and supporting the rights of local and Indigenous communities was a priority of the UN Convention when it adopted the 30x30 goal. Parties to the convention recognized the central role that these communities have played as guardians for generations, but also note that these natural resources are key to their livelihoods and culture.

“For many Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the Andes, the Amazon, and the Congo Basin, the priority is securing and exercising land and resource rights,” says Franco. “The Earth Fund is supporting legal efforts by Indigenous and afro-descendant communities to secure tenure rights to communal lands and assisting with their life plans and improved management of these territories.”

National governments and private donors are also offering innovative funding partnerships to ensure continual and lasting support for major Indigenous-led conservation programs. The Earth Fund supported the creation of Enduring Earth, a partnership between leading conservation NGOs that aims to develop 20 Project Finance for Permanence (PFPs) and protect more than one billion hectares across the world.

First Nation, Inuit, and Métis communities have a long tradition for stewarding the land and waters of Canada. The Earth Fund is a major supporter to create four PFPs in Canada, announced in 2022. This agreement included $800 million of support from the Canadian Government, matched by $200 million from a coalition of private supporters, including the Earth Fund.

Initiatives in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, British Columbia, and Ontario encompassing up to a million square kilometers of land and water will be supported by this combined funding. Among them is coastal British Columbia, home to the Great Bear Rainforest, where the world’s first PFP was launched in 2007. The existing PFP, which was established with equal funding from private and government sources, has protected an area the size of Ireland and created new businesses and hundreds of new jobs in support of conservation, most of which are held by First Nation community members.

New protections announced in 2022 will expand well-funded, Indigenous-led conservation into the coastal waters of British Columbia, where humpback and killer whales migrate, sea otters and salmon swim, and kelp forests and many other species will thrive.

Getting it Done

Securing protection for the most important 30 percent of the world – and making sure these areas are effectively managed – within just a few years will not be easy, but it can be done. It will require strong coalitions of governments, local and Indigenous communities, private funders, NGOs, scientists, and the public. Technology and expertise need to be used to their utmost. Rangers and other stewards need training, support, and the right tools to succeed.

The Earth Fund is undaunted, and collaboration with and innovation from local Indigenous People and local communities, large international NGOs, and corporations will be crucial. The progress of these and other efforts supported by the Earth Fund give reason for optimism. When these things come together, they will offer the best hope for the planet’s intricate and precious web of life.