![]() “If the federal government says ‘we banned oil and gas, now it’s conserved,’ a lot of the conservation community will be unsatisfied,” says Justin Brashares, a wildlife ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. But a drilling ban alone is not enough to convert land into a biodiversity haven, advocates say. waters contribute nearly a quarter of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.īiden’s executive order also places a moratorium on all new federal oil and gas leases existing leases are not expected to be impacted. Fossil fuels extracted from federal lands and U.S. But most of it isn’t managed in a way that meets the 30 by 30 standard, in part because resources are regularly extracted from a lot of it. In his campaign platform, Biden pledged to commit to 30 by 30 for similar reasons: “protecting biodiversity, slowing extinction rates, and helping leverage natural climate solutions.” So how do we get there?Ĭurrently, the federal government owns about 640 million acres of land, about 28 percent of all the land in the U.S. ![]() The 2030 target outlined by nonprofit groups then had three core objectives: to conserve species threatened by development, to protect ecosystems that offer services like storing carbon, and to restore degraded habitats. ![]() In late 2018, several large conservation organizations, including the nonprofit National Geographic Society, published a statement calling for 30 percent of the planet to be sustainably managed by 2030 and 50 percent to be sustainably managed by 2050. The movement was energized by Swiss philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss, who donated a billion dollars to launch the Wyss Campaign for Nature, an initiative devoted to achieving 30 by 30. The White House has yet to specify who will oversee the initiative at the federal level and which lands and waterways might be prioritized. To reach the 30 by 30 target will require conserving an additional area twice the size of Texas, more than 440 million acres, within the next 10 years. is currently conserving around 26 percent of its coastal waters but only about 12 percent of its land in a largely natural state, according to the U.S. That target, referred to as “30 by 30” by the conservation community, is backed by scientists who argue that reaching it is critical both to fighting climate change and to protecting the estimated one million species at risk of going extinct. He also quietly committed his administration to an ambitious conservation goal-to protect 30 percent of U.S. In an executive order issued on January 27 to address the climate crisis, President Joe Biden ordered a pause on new oil and gas leases on public lands and created a White House office of environmental justice.
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