Support local people to protect world’s nature, new report urges, as deadline for global conservation target looms
Achieving an international conservation target to protect almost a third of the world’s land and sea in the next four years could directly affect the lives of almost half the people on the planet, finds a new report.
"Planning land-use change to achieve national and global conservation targets must consider the impacts on local people."
Chris Sandbrook
For better or worse, a huge number of people will be affected by efforts to achieve ‘30x30’ - the internationally-agreed conservation goal to protect and conserve at least 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. How many people, and who they are, will depend on which aspects of nature are prioritised for protection - but in all scenarios this human context must be a key consideration if plans are to succeed for both people and nature.
That’s the message of a new report recently published in the journal Nature Communications, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and involving a diverse international team of researchers and practitioners.
The team considered three approaches to conservation that would enable the world to reach 30x30, with the aim of reversing the decline of nature and boosting our resilience to climate change.
In an approach designed to protect as many different species and ecosystems as possible, they found that 46% of all people worldwide would live inside or within 10 kilometres of a conservation area.
Other approaches would affect fewer people overall, but a higher proportion would be socially vulnerable, showing that implementation choices profoundly shape both the number and social profile of people affected.
Living in or close to conservation areas can have positive, negative or neutral implications for livelihoods and wellbeing. Potential benefits include securing a sustainable supply of clean water or access to cultural sites, whereas costs can include people being prevented from living in an area or using it to collect resources.
“If you look at where new conservation sites might be located, these are not empty landscapes - often a lot of people live there, especially in countries like the UK. Planning land-use change to achieve national and global conservation targets must consider the impacts on local people,” said Professor Chris Sandbrook, Director of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and senior author of the report.
Read the full article by Jacqueline Garget on the University of Cambridge website:
Photo credit: Small-scale agriculture within a volcanic crater in the Pululahua geobotanical reserve, (Javier Fajardo).
Reference: Fajardo, J. et al: ‘Social implications of the 30x30 global conservation target.’ Nature Communications, May 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71860-8
The text in the original article on the University of Cambridge website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.