‘Design conservation with those who will live with it’: 30 by 30 in Africa

Perhaps the best-known target of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is what’s commonly known as “30 by 30,” the aim to bring at least 30% of the world’s terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine ecosystems into effective conservation and equitable management by the year 2030. According to Skytruth’s tracker, which combines multiple databases to provide a ready overview, as of October 2026, African countries had secured 19.9% of terrestrial and 17.2% of marine areas, a tick above the global coverage of 18.7% of land, and 10% of marine landscapes.

As delegates from around the world gather in the ancient city of Yerevan, Armenia, for the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity from Oct. 19 to 30, it seems unlikely that the 30 by30 target will be met.

Since the GBF was agreed in 2022, diverse observers have argued that we should also be turning our attention to what lies beneath these numbers. “The objective is not simply to reach 30% on paper by 2030,” says Daniel Marnewick, a conservation expert with the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. “It is to secure biodiversity, strengthen ecological resilience, and build conservation approaches that are socially legitimate, locally grounded, and sustainable over the long term.”

Beneath the headline figures, Marnewick says, “land and natural resources are under increasing pressure from competing demands, including agriculture, infrastructure, energy, mining, and other forms of economic development.”

One obvious obstacle across the African continent arises from governments’ own conflicting priorities. In Ghana, gold mining has grown increasingly important to the economy in recent years. In November 2022, a legislative order made it easier to approve mining in critically biodiverse areas. Permits rapidly increased and conservation efforts were stifled.

The law was revoked in 2025, but the problem is widespread. Earth Insight, an environmental nonprofit organization, published a report in October that says 8% of terrestrial protected land in the Amazon, Central America, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia is overlapped by an oil and gas block; mining concessions overlap with 7%.

But even where governments are committed to protecting a territory’s biodiversity, they often find it hard going.

Liberia’s proposed Kwa National Park shows how competing interests in the real world can make establishing new protected areas challenging. The new park would cover around 1,720 square kilometers (664 square miles) of rainforest in southeast Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county; it is a relatively sparsely-populated expanse of intact Guinean rainforest that is home to endangered species like western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus).

But this part of Liberia is also experiencing a massive boom in cacao production. While commercial farming is banned in Kwa, plantations are expanding rapidly in community-controlled forests surrounding the would-be park, and some growers are creeping in. While some Grand Gedeh residents oppose the conversion of forests to plantations, many others argue that cacao is providing them with much needed income in a county with high rates of poverty and few other economic options.

Securing local support for establishing Kwa as a national park — and respect for its boundaries afterwards — against the immediate benefits to communities of exploiting this land in other ways is a challenge that is repeated in different forms across the continent.

Threading the needle

Marnewick outlines some guiding points that are essential when talking about effective implementation of the 30 by 30 goal in Africa. The key, he says, is to “design conservation with the people who will live with its consequences.”

Meaningful engagement of local communities must be coupled with the recognition that conservation and livelihoods are interdependent, he says. Traditional “fences and fines” approaches to conservation often deprive members of local communities who rely on a forest or fishery for food and income. To be sustainable, conservation efforts need to be paired with building diverse livelihoods.

An example of this can be seen in a three-year project that involved hunters living on the northern edge of Cameroon’s Dja Faunal Reserve. Researchers from the Great Apes Project of Belgium’s Antwerp Zoo signed reciprocal environmental agreements (REAs) with local hunters offering them technical support to increase productivity on their cacao plantations or to get involved with fishing in return for reducing the time they spent hunting bushmeat to sell. Over the life of the project between 2018 and 2021, those who signed the agreements improved their farming income and hunted significantly less, according to the researchers’ published findings.

“[These agreements] allow the individual to be personally involved in conservation and to directly benefit from it, thus seeing its merit,” Jacob Willie, a co-author of the paper and research coordinator at Antwerp Zoo told Mongabay in 2023. “REAs can therefore more easily convert the individual into a conservation advocate.”

Another key to expanding coverage of protected areas effectively, Marnewick says, is looking beyond the local context to plan on a larger seascape and landscape level. This characteristic can be seen in the planning and maintenance of a wildlife corridor in Sobbe, Namibia. The six-by-four-kilometer (3.7-by-2.5-mile) area facilitates the movement of elephants through farmers’ fields as they transit between protected areas elsewhere in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. The KAZA-TFCA where Sobbe is found highlights conservation thinking on a wide scale, providing governments with a framework to manage 520,000 km2 (201,000 mi2) with the needs of three million residents and 228,000 elephants.

And then, Marnewick says, it’s vital to find resilient, long-term and diverse financing solutions instead of relying on short-term project funding for protected areas.

Marnewick, the IUCN’s global lead on “other effective area-based conservation measures,” explains that OECMs are geographically defined spaces outside of protected areas that can be shown to effectively conserve biodiversity. Unlike protected areas, they can include landscapes managed for other purposes that nonetheless deliver significant conservation outcomes. They can complement protected areas by functioning as buffer zones or ecological corridors and are important in recognizing the conservation efforts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities

OECMs provide a more flexible framework for recognizing areas that make important contributions to biodiversity conservation but do not fit within traditional protected area criteria.

Earlier in 2026, the government of Namibia announced three new OECMs, among them the NamibRand Private Nature reserve, which aims to rehabilitate degraded landscapes and conserve biodiversity while also promoting research and tourism.

The reserve, according to Namibia’s current legal framework, cannot be declared a formally protected area, but recognition of NamibRand as an OECM allows it to count toward the country’s 30 by 30 commitments.

“Ultimately,” Marnewick says, “the characteristics that matter most are ecological integrity, legitimate and effective governance, meaningful local participation, and sustainable financing.”

Anatomy of a success story

A collection of marine protected areas around the Indian Ocean island of Pemba offers an illustration of what authentic implementation of 30 by 30 might look like. Situated in the remarkably biodiverse waters of the Zanzibar archipelago, Pemba too is an economic resource for its residents whose livelihoods depend on fishing. In contrast to the rainforest of Kwa, intensive exploitation of this natural resource is long established.

But almost 100% of Pemba’s coastline is now protected: And the island’s marine protected areas have not been secured at the expense of its residents. Instead, they have been created through economically, socially and environmentally beneficial, collaborative and locally representative methods.

The foundations of the new North-East and South-East Pemba Conservation Areas were laid in 2005 with the establishment of the Pemba Channel Conservation Area (PECCA) in Northern Pemba. Over the last two decades, PECCA has grown into an effectively managed system that safeguards and restores local biodiversity while also contributing to improved livelihoods for more than 800 coastal community members.

When fishers on the island’s eastern shore were faced with declining catches, they had the positive example of PECCA as a ready reference point. With support from Mwambao, an NGO that works in coastal communities in Zanzibar and northern Tanzania, they approached the government to initiate the creation of new MPAs in their waters.

Pemba’s new protected areas are notable for the active involvement of multiple stakeholders and strong co-management systems that have drawn on the diverse knowledge and resources of local communities, government and various organizations including Mwambao, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and a France-headquartered NGO called Blue Alliance, which works with governments, to establish MPAs that can sustain themselves over time.

What works in one place may not work in the next, Marnewick says, but it begins by moving beyond mere consultation of local communities and Indigenous Peoples to meaningful engagement.

Jean Mensa, manager of the Marine Program at WCS Tanzania, says what Pemba really did right was build a high degree of honesty and trust between all those involved. “Don’t be afraid of talking about conservation with communities and don’t be afraid of talking about conservation with governments.”

The government engaged transparently with the community from the onset, looking to them for guidance and trusting them to help create an effective system that works for everyone, Mensa says.

Structural hurdles

As Africa’s conservationists, governments — and the donors needed to support their efforts — talk through how to expand protected area coverage, they will have to overcome twin challenges of finding resources and mobilizing the technical capacity to implement them.

“I think the biggest challenge is financing effective management after designation,” Makame Omar Makame, the head of the Tanzanian Department of Blue Economy and Fisheries, cautions. “We need to effectively manage this particular area. So we may rush into designating an area and achieving 30 by 30 but, in the end, we are not effectively managing those areas.”

Reflecting on the broader global challenge, Makame points to a widely cited 2020 report that estimated an annual global biodiversity financing gap of nearly $700 billion. IUCN assessments found that in East and Southern Africa, existing funding meets only 10-20% of protected area management needs. These figures illustrate Makame’s warning that designating protected areas is only step one; it alone cannot guarantee effective conservation.

Marnewick also points to a daunting gap between international agreements and domestic capacity to implement them. International agreements need to be unpacked and translated into operable national policy frameworks. Administrative and technical constraints often threaten the translation of these larger goals to local realities. This can be seen through the delayed submission of many National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans.

NBSAPs are meant to set out how each country plans to fulfil its obligations under the convention and report back on implementation. When the GBF was agreed in 2022, governments agreed to submit their action plans by the next COP, in 2024: 85% of signatories missed this deadline, including the majority of African countries (though, in fairness, three G7 governments also failed to produce their biodiversity action plans). Many more managed to do so in time for COP17, but among the reasons for the delay is a lack of funding to draw them up.

The biodiversity summit in Yerevan provides an opportunity for participating governments and others to share concrete success stories like Pemba’s MPAs, and concerns such as the practical challenges to making the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kivu-Kinshasa corridor a reality. COP17 can help governments build pathways for collaboration and accelerate real progress toward achieving 30 by 30 in Africa — including overcoming an overreliance on external support and funding.

Marnewick concludes: “For me, the key message [of COP17] is that Africa’s success should not be measured by reported coverage alone, but by the credibility and effectiveness of the conservation systems behind those numbers.”

Banner image: A fisher with an outboard motor on Pemba island, Tanzania. Image courtesy of Adrian Ponsard/WCS.

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Cite this article

Sasha Nunneley (2026). ‘Design conservation with those who will live with it’: 30 by 30 in Africa. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-334316

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