Pathways to 30 by 30

Australia’s commitment to 30×30 is a unique opportunity to rapidly scale up conservation efforts and overcome historic barriers and biases in protected area placement.

As of 2022, Australia’s NRS covered 22.1 per cent of Australia’s inland waters and terrestrial landscapes – a total of 169,941,262 hectares across 13,903 protected areas.

Each state and territory has its own mechanisms to declare protected areas over public land (e.g. national parks and nature reserves), and private land (through conservation covenants). The Australian Government can also declare protected areas on Commonwealth land, collaborate on Indigenous Protected Area agreements led by Indigenous corporations and fund the establishment of new privately protected areas (e.g. via land conservancies). This enables Australia to ensure permanent protection of land through diverse governance arrangements and to meet the unique management needs for biodiversity and people.

With 22.1 per cent of land on the Australian continent protected, the increase in area needed to achieve 30 per cent of protection by 2030 will be more than 60.9 million hectares. However, simply focusing on a coarse target of 30 per cent of the continent alone will not achieve Australia’s commitments under Target 3 of the GBF, nor meet criteria built into our existing scientific framework. There are still large regions of Australia with very little land protected.

Twenty-nine of Australia’s 89 bioregions and 205 of our 419 subregions are still very poorly represented, with less than 10 per cent of their area in any form of protected area in 2022. Fourteen (16 per cent) of our bioregions have only between 5-10 per cent of their area protected, whilst 15 (17 per cent) have less than 5 per cent protected. Some of these areas still have potential for conservation of largely natural areas, while others have been mostly cleared or transformed.

Achieving enhanced protection in under-represented bioregions and subregions will necessarily require the addition of new protected areas where restoration of some degraded ecosystems will be required.