Biden Administration Releases Report on 30 By 30 Conservation Proposal

This week, the Biden administration released a report on its proposal to conserve 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. The initiative, known as 30 by 30, has generated both interest and concern among stakeholders.  

President Biden’s proposal seeks to make conservation and restoration of lands and waters a priority. There is cautious optimism that the proposal could yield a decade of positive investments in protecting biodiversity and wildlife populations, but much depends on how it would be implemented.

With approximately 70 percent of lands in the United States under private ownership, collaborative engagement with ranchers, farmers, foresters, industry, and other private landowners is pivotal for the overall success of such an ambitious effort.

ConservAmerica recently hosted an online discussion on 30x30 that covered both the opportunities and the potential pitfalls of the proposal. You can watch the video of that event here.

We also provided the Department of the Interior with a set of foundational principles, including recognizing the pivotal role private landowners play in conservation and the importance of working collaboratively with state and local stakeholders.

“While ConservAmerica supports the laudable goal of more conservation to sustain wildlife populations, protect biodiversity, and increase carbon sequestration – and believes that if designed properly, 30 by 30 is achievable – our primary concern relates to how the federal government will seek to achieve this ambitious goal,” we wrote in the letter.

A top-down approach that simply withdraws large land and water areas or imposes new federal restrictions on land use without broad local support is destined to fail. You can read ConservAmerica’s full letter to Interior is here.

Now that the Biden administration is out with its report, we are cautiously optimistic about the proposal and its focus on good stewardship and land management. We believe that Biden’s conservation goals cannot be achieved without working with private landowners, and, so far, the President appears to agree with us. Many of the principles we recommend in our public comments are reflected in the report, including respect for private property rights, the value of stewardship by farmers and ranchers on the lands they work, and flexibility in what constitutes conservation so that the priority is on outcomes rather than process.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to shape the final proposal – Biden administration officials themselves call it a "starting point." But there is much to like about the direction the proposal is going. ConservAmerica will remain engaged in the process to help ensure that the principles we outlined in our Interior letter are reflected in the final version. We also look forward to working with the members of the Roosevelt Conservation Caucus to address any concerns they might have about the impact this proposal could have on Western landowners.