30×30 — the global commitment to conserve at least 30% of the planet by 2030 through protected areas and other effective conservation measures — is arguably the most successful conservation slogan in history. Measured by global policy adoption, financial mobilization and brand portability, the target has achieved unprecedented traction: It was formally codified by nearly 200 nations in 2022, has helped unlock some of the largest private philanthropic investments in conservation and has translated a complex ecological threshold into a universal political “North Star.”
But has it done enough — especially for the ocean?
As an ocean conservationist, I’ve spent nearly four decades working alongside local communities, NGOs and governments — from locally managed marine areas to seascape-scale conservation, and from species-specific safeguards to ecosystem-level planning — trying to turn conservation from an idea into something that holds up in the real world. I’ve helped advise, plan and implement the unglamorous but essential machinery that makes protected areas durable: listening, building social license, strengthening governance that people will actually comply with, funding enforcement and monitoring, and ensuring conservation delivers tangible benefits to the communities asked to live with it.
So what follows isn’t a drive-by critique: It’s a practitioner’s look at what 30×30 was meant to deliver, why it’s falling short in the ocean and how we move beyond 2030 without sacrificing credibility.
We have a great opportunity right now: January’s enactment of the High Seas Treaty (formally known as the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement). The treaty doesn’t magically solve 30×30, but it does remove one of the oldest excuses in ocean conservation: that the high seas are simply too complex to protect. If we’re serious about meeting the ocean side of 30×30 without resorting to accounting tricks, this treaty may be our clearest chance to implement protections more concertedly, at the scale the ocean actually demands.
The promise beneath the slogan
The 30×30 premise sounds self-evident (“surely we should protect a big chunk of the planet”), and in its best form it has always meant more than drawing lines on a map. It implies networks that are ecologically representative, connected and managed well — in plain terms: enough land and ocean, protected strongly enough, in the right places, for long enough to matter. But the slogan is a mash-up of science, negotiation and politics. That matters, because slogans don’t protect ecosystems. Outcomes do.
But we also need to start saying the quiet part out loud: At the pace we’re moving, we’re likely to miss 30×30, especially for the ocean. Not because the ocean isn’t worth protecting — but because “30% protected” has become a deceptively simple headline standing in for hard questions about what counts, what works and what endures.
If 2030 arrives with the dashboards still flashing red, the task won’t be to declare failure or pad the numbers. It’ll be to get strategic about what comes next: what the “30” was meant to achieve, why spatial targets keep underdelivering and how we build an after-2030 playbook that prioritizes real protection over paper coverage.
And in a strange way, the High Seas Treaty only sharpened that urgency — it gives us occasion to look hard at 30×30 and sit with the uncomfortable truth that, on current trajectories, the world may be celebrating the tools of protection faster than we’re actually delivering protection itself.
It also offers something 30×30 has always lacked: a way to move the needle on ocean coverage without gaming the numbers — because for the first time, meaningful protection on the high seas can be legally built, not just rhetorically wished for.
How we got to ‘30%’ and why that number stuck
The immediate predecessor to 30×30 was the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 11, which set a goal of 10% ocean protection (and 17% of terrestrial areas) by 2020. In practice, it wasn’t met in a way that delivered consistent outcomes, and it fell far short of what science increasingly suggested was necessary to slow extinction and preserve ecosystem function.
The “30” gained momentum because multiple lines of evidence kept converging on a roughly one-third threshold for meaningful biodiversity persistence and spillover benefits — provided that protection is strong (not just nominal) and well-placed (not just convenient).
Following the IUCN’s 2016 push and the influence of papers like the Global Deal for Nature, the target was ultimately locked in at COP15 (2022) within the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. It is not a magic ecological constant. It is a “big enough to matter” milestone that became politically portable and, at least on paper, measurable.
The integrity gap: Which dashboard are you reading?
This is where things get spicy, because “percent protected” is currently a math problem with two different answers. If you count any area reported as a marine protected area — including weakly regulated multiple-use areas — global tracking lands around 9.6%. If you ask how much of the ocean is fully or highly protected — the level required to reliably deliver biodiversity outcomes — the number drops to roughly 3.2%.
That isn’t a methodological quibble. It’s an integrity gap. One version tracks lines on a map; the other tracks durable reductions in extractive pressure.
There’s another constraint baked into the geometry: National waters only cover 39% of the ocean. The remaining 61% is the high seas, where creating MPAs has historically been legally difficult.
That’s why the High Seas Treaty matters so much. It doesn’t guarantee we’ll hit 30×30, but it finally makes large-scale protection beyond national waters achievable without diluting definitions or padding the accounting. If 30×30 is ever going to be ecologically meaningful (rather than a coastal accounting exercise), the high seas cannot remain governance-lite.
Why spatial targets produce ‘paper parks’
Spatial targets are a vital forcing function. They give governments a concrete benchmark, mobilize finance and make inaction harder to justify.
But they also predictably invite shortcut behavior. The incentive is to designate what is large, remote and politically cheap — especially if the protection can be labeled “multi-use” while still counting toward the target.
That’s how we end up protecting space rather than safeguarding function. Connectivity gets traded away for convenience. Equity becomes an afterthought, with top-down designations that ignore Indigenous governance or repackage dispossession as environmental progress. And the substitution myth takes hold: the idea that an MPA can stand in for the hard work of climate mitigation, pollution control and fisheries reform.
Most of all, capacity lags behind ambition. Area is easy to announce. Management budgets, monitoring, surveillance and enforcement are hard to build — and even harder to sustain.
The post-2030 roadmap: How to fix the target without faking the math
If 2030 arrives and we’re short of the target, the worst move is to declare the idea dead. The better move is to treat 30×30 as the floor, not the ceiling, and shift the center of gravity from coverage to integrity.
This is the part where audience matters. For the general public, the ask is simple: Don’t settle for “protected” on paper. Demand protection that actually works in the water.
For practitioners and decision-makers, the challenge is equally clear: Build systems that can withstand politics, budgets and time.
Here’s what “honest protection” can look like after 2030:
A) Track what matters: “How much is protected” and “how well it’s protected”
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are the ocean equivalent of parks and preserves: places where rules limit damaging activity to safeguard wildlife and habitats. The problem is that not all MPAs are created equal. Future reporting should lead with two numbers: Total MPA coverage (the political umbrella) and highly protected coverage (the ecological reality). This ends the incentive for “paper parks.”
B) Protect the right places, not just the easiest ones
Instead of asking “what percent of the ocean is inside polygons,” we should be asking whether we’re protecting the places that keep the ocean alive: nurseries, migration corridors, climate-safe haven, and biodiversity hotspots. This turns treaty poetry into operational science.
C) Make protection hard to undo
If a protection can be undone in one election cycle, it isn’t conservation — it’s a temporary zoning experiment. Post-2030 success should be measured by durability: legal stability, long-term funding, monitoring and enforcement that can survive leadership changes.
D) Make the high seas count — because now it can
The High Seas Treaty has entered into force — but that’s the starting gun, not the finish line. The real constraint now is implementation: rapidly identifying and designating high-seas MPAs, funding monitoring and enforcement, and closing the participation gap of major ocean powers that still haven’t ratified (including the United States). Without that follow-through, 30×30 remains stranded in national waters by inertia, not math.
E) Stop treating protected areas as a substitute for everything else
Post-2030 success will come from the bundle: fisheries reform, ending destructive gear, shipping noise controls and — nonnegotiably — climate mitigation. The MPA is one tool in a larger risk-reduction portfolio.
F) Confront the drivers — and rebuild trust
We can’t fence our way out of this. If we don’t deal with what’s driving the damage — climate change, relentless extraction and policy that swings wildly every election — then even the best protected places won’t hold. In the U.S., that means owning the time we’ve lost, rebuilding trust with the rest of the world, and making sure climate and conservation work can’t be undone every four years. Protecting nature and cutting emissions aren’t either/or choices anymore. They’re both essential, and they need to happen together.
G) Treat equity as non-negotiable
“Equitably governed” must move from a buzzword to a pass/fail metric. If local communities and Indigenous peoples do not have a seat at the table and a share of the benefits, the protection will eventually fail.
The post-2030 workhorse
And there’s one more reality we need to admit: A lot of effective ocean conservation already exists outside the boundaries of formal MPAs. If we want post-2030 progress without creative accounting, we have to recognize and strengthen the protections that are already working in the real ocean.
MPAs aren’t the only way to protect the ocean. If 30×30 gets shaky after 2030, we need to lean harder on OECMs — “Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures.” In plain terms: places where rules already protect nature, even if they aren’t officially labeled a marine protected area.
The risk is that OECMs become the next loophole — an easy way to pad the numbers. But done right, they’re one of the most practical ways to lock in real protection in busy, contested waters where a formal MPA may be politically difficult. Good OECMs are simple to recognize: they reduce harm, they last and they’re enforced. They also help us escape the false binary of “MPA or nothing.” Some places need full no-take protection. Others can still deliver real conservation outcomes through targeted rules that work.
Take Canada’s “marine refuges,” like the Eastern Canyons. They aren’t formal parks; they are fisheries closures designed to keep heavy bottom-trawls off fragile, cold-water corals. By protecting the seafloor for the sake of the fishery, they effectively safeguard the entire ecosystem.
That’s the OECM idea in real life: practical rules that stick and concretely reduce harm.
In practice OECMs can include seasonal closures that protect spawning, permanent bans on destructive gear in sensitive habitats, anchoring exclusions over seagrass and reefs, shipping measures that reduce strikes and noise, or Indigenous- and community-governed waters where stewardship is already strong.
These aren’t consolation prizes. They’re functional protection — often in precisely the places where it’s hardest, and most urgent, to get it right.
A note for 2031: The maturity of a movement
We still have four years left in this decade. There’s time to surprise ourselves — and I genuinely hope I’m wrong about the current trajectory of protection. I hope enforcement tightens, quality accelerates and the high seas finally starts counting in a way that matters.
And while this essay has focused on the ocean, the broader lesson isn’t uniquely marine. 30×30 was always a global commitment — land and sea — and the same integrity questions apply everywhere: what counts, what works, what lasts and who benefits. If we get the post-2030 course correction right in the ocean, the framework can serve terrestrial practitioners too — not as a new set of loopholes, but as a shared standard for honest protection.
So what do we say out loud in 2031 if the dashboard isn’t green?
Something like this: “30×30 was the minimum milestone that got the world moving. We didn’t hit the deadline, but we finally stopped pretending that ‘protected’ means ‘safe.’ From here on, our benchmark is no longer the size of the map, but the health of the life within it.”
Missing a conservation deadline is a gut punch, especially with everything at stake right now. But hollowing out the definition of protection is a catastrophe. By refusing to settle for accounting tricks, we ensure that 30×30 isn’t just a failed slogan. It becomes the beginning of a more honest, more mature and more durable relationship with the living planet.
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