Some papers on 30 x 30 and protected areas in general

Lately I've been reading a lot of science papers related to protected areas and 30x30: the idea of protecting (and/or 'conserving') 30% of the earth by 2030. I thought it might be helpful to share all of the summaries I have on the topic in one place. As always, these summaries are my personal opinion only, and I welcome input / critique / etc.

Specific to recommendations for 30 x 30 in the US:

Simmons et al. 2021 (a non-peer-reviewed white paper) looks at a few options to meet 30 by 30 in the U.S. (protecting 30% of the country on land by 2030) with four different focal objectives (all also minimizing acquisition cost): area alone, carbon sequestration and avoided emissions, landscape connectivity, and climate-resilient species and habitat. It’s a fairly coarse and simplistic assessment, but it does a good job highlighting the kinds of tradeoffs to consider when deciding which lands we advocate for protecting. Check out Figure 2 which shows how their four scenarios perform (on cost, ecosystem representation, and climate mitigation) and where they would protect across the lower 48 states. They close with recommending clear objectives to prioritize where to protect, focus protections on threatened areas, develop metrics to track progress and impact (including on issues like social equity), and use diverse options (beyond traditional protected areas) to provide protection. Check out the appendix for maps showing which areas are already somewhat protected (as GAP 3).

Jenkins et al. 2015 highlights an inconvenient truth about protected areas in the United States: they are mostly located in places with relatively low species richness and threats of conversion. In other words, if the main goal of protected areas is to prevent as many species as possible from going extent, they're poorly sited. You can compare biodiversity maps in Fig 1 & 2 to PAs in Fig 3 to see the mismatch. Fig 4 has their recommendations for 9 areas where conservation should be focused in the SE and West coast. 

Other papers on protection targets etc.:

Barnes et al. 2018 highlights the downside of area targets: they may drive siting protected areas (PAs) in bad places and poor enforcement / management. They promote a shift to outcome-based protected area targets (meaning the targets are about biodiversity gains or avoided losses), emphasizing representation and connectivity, and building the evidence base for which factors affect how well PAs deliver conservation outcomes.

Bhola et al. 2020 sums up four different philosophies or perspectives for setting global conservation goals. 1) extending Aichi biodiversity target #11 (protecting & managing 17% of land and inland water, plus 10% coastal and marine, while considering biodiversity, equity, ecosystem services, and connectivity) to 2030 and ensuring the qualitative piece is achieved. 2) Big area-based goals like 'half earth' or protecting 30% of the earth by 2030 (still ensuring that the right places get protected). 3) ‘New conservation’ (broadening the tent for conservation via ecosystem services, ecotourism, and the private sector). 4) ‘Whole earth’ conservation which attacks root causes of habitat loss like inequality and economic growth (while arguing against separating people from nature). It's a quick read but start w/ Table 1 for a summary of the four perspectives, and Figure 1 which shows how the choice of goal (in this case, biodiversity vs. ecosystem service production) affects which areas you’d want to protect.

Devillers et al. 2015 argues that marine protected areas (MPAs) have largely been cited in remote areas with low threats that the MPAs are intended to address. They point out that politics drive MPAs to be established in places that minimize costs and conflicts with commercial interests, but that MPAs that avoid potential conflicts will by definition have low impact relative to business as usual. They offer two Australian case studies and in particular highlight how well the 2004 rezoning of the great barrier reef was done in terms of improving ecological representation, although still with room to improve. They suggest planners of MPAs and/or no-take zones ask four questions: 1. Are MPAs intended to protect biodiversity? 2. Do proposed MPAs give precedence to more threatened biodiversity features? 3. Do MPAs adequately represent all biodiversity features of interest? and 4. Do MPAs adequately represent variation within features (like bioregions) to focus on the most threatened sub-areas?

Hannah et al. 2020 estimates that effectively conserving 30% of tropical land could cut predicted species extinction by ~1/2-2/3 (if the conserved areas are both cited ideally and managed well: this is not about legal protection alone). Conserving 50% could reduce extinction by more like 2/3-80% (see Table 1 for details including how this varies by region). This is useful to understand how effective conservation can be at different scales. But it's important to note that citing PAs in ideal locations continues to be elusive, this model relies on fairly simple assumptions using species-area curves, and the fact that the results didn't vary much with climate change (RCP2.6 vs RCP 8.5) is concerning. Nonetheless, this could be motivating to highlight the importance of protecting and managing enough of the right places on earth to slow species extinction.

Jantke et al. 2019 proposes a clever way to ensure that "% protected" goals like 30 by 30 (protecting 30% of a country on land and water by 2030) don't focus on easy to protect habitat types while other habitat types remain mostly unprotected. They suggest reporting “mean target achievement” where the % protected of each habitat type would be averaged and compared to a habitat-level goal (See section 2.2 for the equation - crucially achievement maxes out at 100% so overprotection in one habitat can't compensate for underprotection in another). They use Australia's Commonwealth Marine Reserve as an example; it protects 43% of the five marine regions it covers, but still falls short of its goal of protecting at least 10% of each of the 53 bioregions within it. This is a great complement to the total % protected indicator, as ecological representation has badly lagged behind total protection, and the rush to protect a lot more area very quickly will make it very tempting to focus on the easiest habitats to protect even though many other habitats have little to no protection.

Mogg et al. 2019 looks at how much protection is needed to keep land mammals healthy. They assume every species needs 80% of its range protected (plus 10% more as buffer), so Oceania and South America need more than 70% of their land to be protected! They ignore any considerations about meeting demand for food or livelihoods, and it’s odd to me to see the focus on making protected areas much larger much faster given that the paper’s intro mentions that enforcement of current PAs is a major problem. It’s definitely an interesting analysis, but I think it’s really hard to try and get support behind a proposal that doesn’t even attempt to consider human needs as well as ecosystem / species needs.

Global estimates of % protection hide the fact that protection varies widely for different ecosystems and habitat types. Sayre et al. 2020 splits that up into 278 natural ecosystems (based on temperature, moisture, elevation, land cover, etc.). If you limit protection to IUCN 1-4 (stricter protection), 9 of those 278 were totally unprotected and 206 were below 8.5% protected (halfway to Aichi targets). If you use IUCN 1-6 (including areas allowing more human use) only 1/3 of ecosystems are below 8.5%. Table 5 shows how much of each major land cover group (forests, grasslands, etc.) has been lost, Table 4 has the details for the 278 ecosystems. Some figures are easier to see online: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989419307231?via%3Dihub

Waldron et al. 2020 looks at global financial implications of 30 x 30 (6 terrestrial and 5 marine scenarios), and for tropical forests & mangroves adds in avoided costs and non-monetary ecosystem service values. They estimate that expanding protected areas (PAs) to 30% could result in increased direct global revenues of $64-454 billion / yr (depending on the scenario chosen, and mostly driven by increased nature tourism, see Table 3) as well as more food and wood production. Broader economic benefits (largely from avoided storm damage) could be $170-534 billion / yr more. With a estimated cost of $103-$178 billion / yr (which includes funding to manage existing PAs), they find net economic benefits to 30x30 across all scenarios (spend some time with Table 3 to see the details, but $235 billion / yr is the lowest net financial benefit). It's hard to vet this kind of complex analysis with a ton of assumptions. My gut tells me this is a pretty optimistic assessment due to several key assumptions (like a social cost of carbon at $135-540 / t CO2e , assuming big tourism increases and scarcity of wood driving up forest product revenue, etc.). But they point out that it could be an underestimate since they didn't include broader benefits of other ecosystems like grasslands. Thoughts welcome! Note that other scientists criticized the Waldron paper, noting that not nearly enough has been done to estimate how 30x30 would affect people (nor to consult with them), among other issues. The critique (Agrawal et al. 2020) is here: https://openlettertowaldronetal.wordpress.com/

Wenzel et al. 2020 (NOAA’s 2020 MPA report) has a good overview of marine (and great lakes) protection in the U.S. 26% of US waters are in an MPA, but only 3% in a no-take zone. Page 5 of the PDF has a breakdown by region showing that some places like Alaska are disproportionately unprotected. The report also indicates MPA coverage by habitat type (e.g. 83% of mangroves are protected), calls for OECMs to improve MPA connectivity, and notes the need for better management of MPAs.

 

REFERENCES:

Agrawal et al. 2020. An Open Letter to the Lead Authors of ‘Protecting 30% of the Planet for Nature: Costs, Benefits and Implications.’ https://openlettertowaldronetal.wordpress.com/

Barnes, M. D., Glew, L., Wyborn, C., & Craigie, I. D. (2018). Prevent perverse outcomes from global protected area policy. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2(5), 759–762. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0501-y

Bhola, N., Klimmek, H., Kingston, N., Burgess, N. D., Soesbergen, A., Corrigan, C., Harrison, J., & Kok, M. T. J. (2020). Perspectives on area‐based conservation and its meaning for future biodiversity policy. Conservation Biology, 00(0), cobi.13509. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13509

Devillers, R., Pressey, R. L., Grech, A., Kittinger, J. N., Edgar, G. J., Ward, T., & Watson, R. (2015). Reinventing residual reserves in the sea: are we favouring ease of establishment over need for protection? Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 25(4), 480–504. https://doi.org/10.1002/aqc.2445

Hannah, L., Roehrdanz, P. R., Marquet, P. A., Enquist, B. J., Midgley, G., Foden, W., Lovett, J. C., Corlett, R. T., Corcoran, D., Butchart, S. H. M. M., Boyle, B., Feng, X., Maitner, B., Fajardo, J., McGill, B. J., Merow, C., Morueta-Holme, N., Newman, E. A., Park, D. S., … Svenning, J. C. (2020). 30% Land Conservation and Climate Action Reduces Tropical Extinction Risk By More Than 50%. Ecography, 43(7), 943–953. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.05166

Jantke, K., Kuempel, C. D., McGowan, J., Chauvenet, A. L. M., & Possingham, H. P. (2019). Metrics for evaluating representation target achievement in protected area networks. Diversity and Distributions, 25(2), 170–175. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12853

Jenkins, C. N., Van Houtan, K. S., Pimm, S. L., & Sexton, J. O. (2015). US protected lands mismatch biodiversity priorities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(16), 5081–5086. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418034112

Mogg, S., Fastre, C., Jung, M., & Visconti, P. (2019). Targeted expansion of Protected Areas to maximise the persistence of terrestrial mammals. BioRxiv, 3056, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1101/608992

Sayre, R., Karagulle, D., Frye, C., Boucher, T., Wolff, N. H., Breyer, S., Wright, D., Martin, M., Butler, K., Van Graafeiland, K., Touval, J., Sotomayor, L., McGowan, J., Game, E. T., & Possingham, H. (2020). An assessment of the representation of ecosystems in global protected areas using new maps of World Climate Regions and World Ecosystems. Global Ecology and Conservation, 21(December), e00860. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00860

Simmons, B. A., Nolte, C., & McGowan, J. (2021). Delivering on Biden’s 2030 Conservation Commitment. https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2021/01/28/delivering-on-bidens-2030-conservation-commitment/

Waldron, A., Adams, V., Allan, J., Arnell, A., Asner, G., Atkinson, S., Baccini, A., Baillie, J. E., Balmford, A., Beau, J. A., Brander, L., Brondizio, E., Bruner, A., Burgess, N., Burkart, K., Butchart, S., Wenzel, L., D’Iorio, M., Wahle, C., Cid, G., Canizzo, Z., & Darr, K. (2020). Marine protected areas 2020: Building effective conservation networks. https://nmsmarineprotectedareas.blob.core.windows.net/marineprotectedareas-prod/media/docs/2020-mpa-building-effective-conservation-networks.pdf

Wenzel, L., D’Iorio, M., Wahle, C., Cid, G., Canizzo, Z., & Darr, K. (2020). Marine protected areas 2020: Building effective conservation networks. https://nmsmarineprotectedareas.blob.core.windows.net/marineprotectedareas-prod/media/docs/2020-mpa-building-effective-conservation-networks.pdf