In June 2021, Australia joined the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People – a body that sought to drive international consensus on 30×30. In December 2022, the Australian Government committed to the GBF, and the 30×30 commitment was backed by all Australian state and territory environment ministers in October 2022.
While delivery of this commitment will help Australia make significant progress in addressing the global biodiversity crisis, it is essential that the pathways we take to get there deliver enduring outcomes for people and nature. Protected areas can make significant social and economic contributions to regional and remote communities when they are planned and managed with these benefits in mind.
Australia faces an unprecedented opportunity – to build a network of well managed protected areas by 2030, which play a central role in preventing extinctions, mitigating climate change and delivering continent-wide recovery of environmental values and diversifying regional economies.
To achieve this, we must ensure that our targets encompass a broad selection of representative habitats, in all regions across the continent.
This science-based approach will also alleviate intense land use competition, adapt to worsening environmental conditions and ensure the costs of recovering threatened species and land acquisition are not increasingly prohibitive.
Australia is well placed to lead the way in protecting 30 per cent of its land and oceans by 2030. We are world leaders in innovative and relatively equitable land protection, and with an equally robust record on ocean conservation. Australia has already come a long way, with 22 per cent of Australia’s land currently in protected areas, up from seven per cent in the mid-1990s.
While national parks and nature reserves on public land are some of the most common approaches used to meet national protection targets, Australia has pioneered several other approaches to land conservation.
Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) cover more than 74 million hectares and make up half of our protected area estate on land. These occur in iconic landscapes such as the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, Cape York, and the vast deserts of central Australia, as well as smaller areas in agricultural or peri-urban landscapes. Bilbies, rock-wallabies and Gouldian Finches are just a handful of many species that have benefited from improved management from Indigenous rangers and Indigenous Protected Areas. IPAs are on track to form the majority (by area) of all terrestrial protected areas in Australia.
Australia also has more than 6,000 privately protected areas and has the largest area of land under this arrangement in the world. Through progressive philanthropic and government investment in land purchase by non-government land trusts and commitment from private landholders to permanent protection of habitats on their properties through conservation covenants, privately protected areas conserve some of Australia’s most threatened ecosystems and provide critical landscape connectivity.
To meet the national 30×30 commitment requires protecting at least a further 60 million hectares of land. Securing this additional eight per cent on land by 2030 is ambitious, but achievable.
Beneath the national target of at least 30 per cent sits an important set of criteria and metrics to determine priorities for expanding the protected area estate and to ensure we protect the full suite of ecosystems across Australia’s diverse landscapes. It is not simply a measure of how much of the continent is protected – it is also a matter of the diversity and quality of landscapes and biodiversity protected.