Heather Bingham, who heads up UNEP-WCMC’s Protected Planet Initiative, reports back following a recent cross-sector meeting to drive forward support and action on the latest global target for protected and conserved areas 
 
Long before it was adopted, Target 3 of the new Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and related package of decisions was perhaps the most well-known major new global conservation target, thanks to a successful global awareness campaign promoting “30x30” – increasing protected and conserved areas to cover 30 per cent of the world’s land, inland waters, and oceans by 2030.  
 
However, achieving Target 3 is about much more than increasing global coverage of land and water areas designated for area-based conservation. The new target goes beyond percentages and stipulates the 30 per cent global coverage needs to especially include places of importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, and that these areas should be well-connected, effectively managed, ecologically representative and equitably governed.      
 
Parties to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are now working hard to review their national efforts to safeguard nature, ensuring that national conservation action drives progress towards the ambitious new GBF targets for 2030 – including Target 3 and related targets, for example on spatial planning and finance. The global conservation community is rallying to support them with capacity development, research, tools and planning. 
 
The complexity of Target 3 when all its elements are considered will require cohesive, smart and urgent action from governments, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, supporting non-governmental organisations (NGOs), scientists, civil society and the private sector.  
 
To help us get there, last month, the CBD Secretariat and the World Commission on Protected Areas of the International Union for Conservation of Nature convened a workshop - hosted by UNEP-WCMC in Cambridge, UK – to discuss establishing a partnership focused on providing support to achieving Target 3.

The three-day workshop from 12-15 June, attended by 70 delegates comprising Parties to the CBD, representatives of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and NGOs and the UN system, began by hearing from Parties about the areas in which they most need support. These areas guided the following two days of discussions, as participants sought to identify where a “Target 3 Partnership” could add most value to the existing landscape of support efforts.  
 
While many of the organisations present are already working to support Parties and other rightsholders and stakeholders in implementing action towards the ambitions of Target 3, there was a strong sense that a formalised partnership could play a vital coordination role, ensuring that the partners’ collective efforts were targeted and complementary. This was accompanied by a definite feeling of willingness to collaborate, in light of the ambition of the task at hand and the ever-shortening timeline to 2030.  
 
Importantly, participants identified that support to Target 3 will need to be intertwined with leveraging additional finance, and also support to Target 1 – on spatial planning – and Target 2 – on boosting restoration activity. This realisation led, late into the second day of discussions, to the re-envisioning of the proposal as a partnership to provide broader support across all three of these targets focused on area-based conservation.  
 
The concluding approach and sentiments of the workshop – that global action on protected and conserved areas is intimately linked to restoration efforts, and it is vital that both are guided by powerful geospatial intelligence and planning – were very encouraging, and echo UNEP-WCMC’s mission to bring joined-up science and policy strategies to achieving the collective ambition of a world living in harmony with nature. 
 
The initial partnership workshop will be documented in a forthcoming CBD Secretariat report, to be published alongside a formal notification inviting expressions of interest in joining the emerging partnership. We look forward to working with all stakeholders to support the new partnership initiative as it progresses.  

UNEP-WCMC maintains and develops the Protected Planet Initiative, the definitive global source of knowledge and data on the status and trends of protected and conserved areas.