The 30x30 conservation goal is one of the most widely cited commitments in global biodiversity policy. A new study asks about the people it would affect—and finds that the answer depends entirely on which path we take.

Protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 is one of the most cited commitments in global biodiversity policy. But there is a question that has received surprisingly little attention: how many people live in the areas that would need to come under protection to meet it, and what would that mean for them? 

A new study in Nature Communications, led by Javier Fajardo of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and co-authored by Prof. Julie G. Zähringer of the Wyss Academy and Brian O'Donnell, a member of the Wyss Academy's Advisory Committee, has mapped those human stakes. The results are not an argument against protection, but they make clear that the social consequences vary enormously depending on which path is taken. 

Today, around 396 million people already live inside protected areas. Under a scenario designed to maximize biodiversity outcomes, that number could rise to 2.2 billion. The area covered would not even double, but the number of people affected would increase more than fivefold. Among them: 195 million living in conditions of low human development, and hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers for whom land is not an abstract policy question but the foundation of a livelihood. 

Other scenarios produce different profiles. One centered on nature's contributions to people, clean water, flood regulation, crop pollination, would affect around one billion people, many living adjacent to tropical forests whose ecological role extends far beyond the communities that depend on them. If the world benefits from those forests remaining intact, the study raises an uncomfortable question about who should bear the cost of keeping them that way. 

A third scenario, one that recognizes Indigenous and traditional territories, affects fewer people overall, but the profile of who those people are is particularly telling. Some 74% live in low human development conditions, and 91% rely on wild harvesting for their livelihoods. These are not populations at the edges of conservation. They are, in many cases, its long-standing practitioners. 

The study's argument is not that the 30x30 target is wrong. It is that the target's ecological ambition currently outpaces its social architecture. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent needs to function as a genuine requirement rather than a procedural step. Financing needs to reach the communities bearing the real costs. Social indicators need to carry weight in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's monitoring framework, not as afterthoughts, but as measures of whether conservation is actually working for the people most directly affected by it.  

Those are not only policy recommendations. They describe the practical terrain that communities, Indigenous peoples, and local institutions already navigate, often without formal recognition or adequate support. The Wyss Academy works on other effective area-based conservation measures across its Solutionscapes precisely at this intersection: where global conservation frameworks meet the governance, rights, and livelihoods of the people living inside them. This paper puts global numbers to what that work encounters on the ground. 

Text: Predrag Tripkovic