- Convenors:
-
Catherine Corson
(Mount Holyoke College)
Chris Sandbrook (University of Cambridge)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
The panel will consist of four to five paper presentations with time for discussion among panelists and with the audience.
Long Abstract
The 2025 World Conservation Congress called for urgent action to redress “irreversible effects on the planet’s life support systems”. This call occurs at a critical historical juncture that is characterized both by efforts to reimagine conservation and recognize human rights and by the consolidation of elite networks of actors in finance, technology, and government who invoke narratives of urgency and innovation to justify turning to the very drivers of biodiversity loss—the exploitations inherent in capitalism— to meet global conservation targets. In this panel, we examine these trends in relation to Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed to at the 2022 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Often referred to as 30x30, it calls for 30% of the earth’s land, seas and freshwaters to be protected by 2030. It has dominated discourse around the KMGBF because it is both highly ambitious and highly contentious – some see it as green grabbing while others, including some rights-holders and allies, see it as an opportunity to promote Indigenous peoples and local communities' rights. Political ecologists’ attention to power and scale helps to illuminate how green capitalism reinforces the ultimate drivers of degradation and inequality in conservation as well as how to reconfigure relations of governance so as to further more equitable area-based conservation.
Panelists critically examine topics, such as:
1) How did 30x30 achieve international consensus? What advocacy strategies and power dynamics enabled its transformation from a fringe idea to a global target?
2) How are innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, being used to monitor and promote area-based conservation?
3) How is the turn to private and innovative finance transforming conservation?
4) How are efforts such as reimagining conservation and human rights-based approaches opening up space to decolonize it?
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
Using the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Conservation Congress in 2025, I show how AI is reshaping power relations in global conservation governance: redefining what constitutes biodiversity, who has rights to it, and who makes money off of it.
Presentation long abstract
Neoliberalized governments face strong incentives to use innovative financial technology to meet ambitious global environmental targets like those in the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework. Technological innovations such as cloud computing, machine-learning, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) are increasing being used to identify and monitor species, surveil and redress the drivers of their loss, prioritize their conservation, and even predict the outcomes of global negotiations. In turn, investors are finding novel ways to digitize, commoditize, and financialize the related data, models, and results so as to generate new revenue streams. Drawing on data from the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Colombia in October 2024, and the World Conservation Congress, held in United Arab Emirates in October 2025, I illustrate how actors—from conservation organizations to technology firms—are utilizing international conferences build alliances among traditional conservation actors and potential investors around the use of AI to monitor, conserve, and fundraise for biodiversity. These conferences provide platforms to showcase AI projects, debate the ethics of AI, and advance voluntary mechanisms to provide guardrails on its use. Many of these actors draw on narratives of urgency and innovation to justify eliding concerns about energy use and data sovereignty, as well as potential biases in generative AI used to predict conservation outcomes and prioritize conservation investments. Ultimately, I argue that AI is reshaping power relations in global biodiversity conservation governance: redefining what constitutes biodiversity, who has rights to it, and who makes money off of it.
Presentation short abstract
Political ecology often critiques area-based conservation and the 30×30 target, but this can flatten contemporary practice into a “fortress” caricature. I argue that this limits engagement and overlooks nuance. I identify common misconceptions and highlight examples of more constructive scholarship.
Presentation long abstract
Political ecology scholarship has tended to adopt a critical stance towards area-based conservation, highlighting various negative issues including displacement, militarised enforcement and uneven power dynamics. It is therefore unsurprising that many political ecologists were highly critical of the campaign to include ‘half earth’ or ‘30x30’ in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. While the latter spatial target was included in the final framework, the text also includes multiple qualitative social elements that highlight issues such as equitable governance, respect for Indigenous lands and territories, and human rights. This raises the question of how political ecologists should respond to the 30x30 target, which can be read as a smoke-screen for underlying protectionist ambitions, an opportunity to re-imagine area-based conservation as a mechanism to support the aspirations of local residents, or both. In this paper, I will argue that rather than giving these questions careful consideration, current political ecology scholarship often presents a somewhat caricatured narrative of area-based conservation as fortress conservation that is not consistent with much contemporary practice. This undermines opportunities for meaningful engagement with practitioners and policy makers. I will identify several common misconceptions, and highlight examples that adopt a more nuanced approach to scholarship on this critically important topic.
Presentation short abstract
This paper seeks to untangle some of the complexities of international policy translation. Through the lens of Colombia’s OECM “boom”, I will explore how the dual spatial and temporal pressures produced by 30x30 set in motion of range of policy outcomes.
Presentation long abstract
This paper seeks to untangle some of the complexities of international policy translation. Through the lens of Colombia’s OECM “boom”, I will explore how the dual spatial and temporal pressures produced by 30x30 set in motion of range of policy outcomes. In Colombia, the baggy concept of 'shared governance' acted as a vehicle of power which enabled the state to expand its virtual ‘conservation estate’. This estate – calculated in spatio-numeric form – extends horizontally via polygons and GPS layers, on virtual displays. Hectares bound, amassed, and exhibited in a dual move of recognition through reporting to a global digital database. I will argue that ambitious commitments, once downscaled, can become instruments of bureaucratic expansion rather than plural governance. Finally, I consider the care-ful work of policy brokers, who stay with the trouble and attempt to clean up the mess.
Presentation short abstract
An interdisciplinary analysis of the social implications of 30×30, showing who may be affected by conservation expansion and offering insights on potential consequences for equity, governance, and more just conservation futures.
Presentation long abstract
Target 3 of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (the “30×30 conservation target”) aims to protect 30% of lands and waters by 2030. While it is clear that achieving this ambition will reshape relations between conservation and society at scale, its social implications remain poorly understood. This talk draws on collaborative work from an interdisciplinary working group under the Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP) that brought together researchers and practitioners in conservation, political ecology, Indigenous and community rights, and related fields.
We examined these implications through a range of approaches, from global and national spatial assessments to comparative insights from six country case studies and interdisciplinary dialogue. My talk will focus on our global assessment estimating the size and socioeconomic characteristics of populations living in or near candidate areas under three implementation logics. Results show that large populations may be affected and that their circumstances differ widely depending on the values guiding spatial priorities — from millions living near biodiversity-priority zones to Indigenous and Traditional Territories where people’s livelihoods are closely interwoven with their local environments.
I will also refer to our first attempts at national-level work that seeks to characterise potentially affected populations in greater detail, and to lessons from the case study review. Our work reinforces that 30×30 is not only an ecological challenge but equally a deeply social one — requiring dialogue and the integration of social perspectives in planning and decision-making if it is to avoid reproducing inequalities and instead support more equitable conservation futures.
Presentation short abstract
Global priority mapping is crucial for better conservation decision-making. We review the global conservation prioritisation literature to better understand how it has changed and what it has achieved, examining the data layers used to consider potential justice implications.
Presentation long abstract
Global priority mapping has been considered as important and necessary for tackling the biodiversity and climate crisis, to better plan and manage conservation interventions. These global priority maps have proliferated over the past two decades, especially with digital technological advances and the increasing availability of big geospatial datasets. However, critics of global maps have also raised concerns around their usefulness and applicability. This is particularly pertinent given the renewed focus on having the right (global) data to calculate indicators for monitoring progress towards the Global Biodiversity Framework targets. Through a review of global area-based conservation prioritisation literature, we examine how this body of work has changed and what it has achieved, particularly asking if having better and more data has led to improved prioritisations. We apply a cluster analysis based on characteristics of each paper such as spatial resolution of analysis, programme used for identifying priorities, and criteria for priorities, examining how this literature (and the resultant maps) has changed over time. We also identify the most frequently used global geospatial data layers and consider how they were used, focusing on what or whose perspectives might have been missed out through the way data were constructed and applied.