According to Yale Climate Connections, “30 by 30” is an ambitious plan to protect 30% of the USA’s land in a natural state by 2030. There is also a less ambitious part of the plan to protect 30% of the USA’s ocean area. I say the ocean part is less ambitious because, according to this article, 26% is already protected. And all you really have to do to protect the ocean (on paper) is draw a box on a map and pass a law saying that box is now protected.

The article refers to E.O. Wilson’s book Half Earth, which argues for protecting…I forget how much of the Earth, I am not good at math. But you get the idea. The moral and rhetorical case here is biodiversity-based, but it’s pretty clear that the practical case is carbon sequestration. There must be a cost-benefit calculation somewhere in there that this is the cheap way to make some progress on blunting the droughts, fires, floods, famines and abandoned coastal cities that are headed our way if we do nothing, and maybe even if we do something but not enough.

Land is different. This article says about 12% is now protected. So how would we actually get to 30? There must be 30% of land out there that is just not legally protected yet.

Achieving 30 by 30 will require action on numerous fronts. “A national program to enact 30 by 30 won’t just be a series of new national parks declared by the President, but will include things like national wildlife refuges, national monuments, state-level protected areas, conservation easements on private land, and co-management with tribal leadership,” wrote marine conservation biologist David Shiffman in Scientific American last October. “Local consultation and support will have to be part of it from the beginning, but it won’t be successful without support and leadership from the federal government.”

And it won’t be enough just to protect any land; it will matter significantly which 30 percent is protected. “Conserving a giant, undeveloped stretch of land where little lives and that no one wanted to develop anyway is not especially helpful to biodiversity conservation or climate resilience,” Shiffman wrote. At least some part of every major ecosystem needs to be protected, he wrote…

More than half of the country’s forests – critical carbon sinks, places that absorb more carbon dioxide than they release – are privately owned. U.C. Berkeley environmental science professors Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares in the New York Times in December 2020 wrote that “private lands also connect our public lands, providing seasonal habitat for wide-ranging wildlife and clean drinking water, crop pollination, and flood control.” With about 12 percent of the privately land now meeting the 30 by 30 goals, they wrote, protecting the remaining 18 percent “means protecting an area more than twice the size of Texas.”

Yale Climate Connections

For this to be viable, it almost has to be easier than it sounds. I know large private forests are owned by university endowments and other wealthy institutional investors. They can either log them, or they can leave the trees in the ground to get more valuable until they log them later. Or they can sell them, or for all I know buy and sell complicated derivatives based on them. These investors are probably open to the idea of conservation easements which give them an additional payoff in return for agreeing not to develop (i.e. pave or build buildings) the land, which they are probably not interested in doing anyway. This is all speculation on my part.

There’s a lot of farmland out there that farmers would probably be happy to sell for reforestation (or restoration of grassland or wetland habitats) if the government were willing to pay. But I assume we need most of our cropland for growing crops, and taking cropland out of production doesn’t seem like a politically likely solution. Soil conservation is always good, but counting farms engaging in soil conservation practices as “protected natural land” would seem a bit sneaky. If that is what they are thinking, the 30% wouldn’t sound ambitious at all, it would just be a practical common-sense soil conservation program. Again, all speculation on my part. It will be interesting to hear more about this, and interesting to see if the administration can communicate it in a way that avoids conspiracy theories about the government coming for our sacrosanct private property.