More than half of countries have not committed to protecting 30% of their land and sea for nature by 2030 in plans submitted to the UN – despite signing a global agreement to do so less than three years ago, a Carbon Brief and Guardian investigation can reveal.
In December 2022, nearly all nations agreed to protect “30% of Earth’s land and sea for nature” by the end of the decade. This commitment – referred to as “30 by 30” – is the flagship target of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), often likened to the “Paris Agreement for nature”.
But, 70 out of the 137 (51%) countries that have submitted UN plans outlining how they will meet the targets of the GBF do not commit to “30 by 30” within their borders, according to analysis of these documents by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.
Instead, these countries either pledge to protect a lower percentage of their territory for nature or fail to explicitly commit to a numerical target at all.
Countries failing to commit to “30 by 30” in UN plans represent just over one-third of Earth’s land surface, the analysis shows.
The list includes some of the most nature-rich nations on Earth, such as Indonesia, Peru and South Africa, along with developed countries such as Finland, Norway and Switzerland.
Speaking to Carbon Brief and the Guardian, one nation said that meeting “30 by 30” within its borders would be “extremely challenging” to achieve, while another said that developing countries in particular should not face an “unnecessarily heavy burden” in reaching the global goal.
The investigation shows that “many countries have not been ambitious enough with their domestic conservation commitments and, as a result, we are collectively not currently on track to meet the global 30 by 30 target”, one expert said.
A third of Earth
At the COP15 nature summit in 2022, countries agreed to the GBF, a broad set of targets and goals with an overall aim to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
Target 3 of the GBF – which says countries should ensure “at least” 30% of Earth is in protected areas or governed by other conservation measures by 2030 (“30 by 30”) – is considered by many to be the flagship aim of the agreement and has been likened to the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement in articles and speeches stressing its importance.
All countries were asked to submit plans to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity outlining how they will meet the targets of the GBF within their territories ahead of the COP16 nature summit in 2024. These are called national biodiversity strategies and action plans, or “NBSAPs”.
A separate Carbon Brief and Guardian investigation last October found that 85% of countries missed the deadline to submit their NBSAPs, with some arguing that the deadline was too challenging or that they were not able to access funds to help prepare their documents.
Countries unable to produce their NBSAPs were asked to instead submit national targets to the UN. These are simple lists of targets that countries will aim for without an accompanying plan of action.
As of 24 February 2025, 44 countries and the EU had submitted NBSAPs to the UN, while 124 parties had submitted national targets. (As some countries submitted both national targets and NBSAPs, it means that, overall, 137 countries have put forward a plan of some kind.)
To investigate whether countries have committed to the “30 by 30” pledge within their borders in these plans, Carbon Brief and the Guardian analysed the full text of each NBSAP, as well as any target that had been tagged as relating to target 3 of the GBF.
The analysis finds that, of 137 countries that have submitted plans to the CBD, more than half – 70 countries, or 51% – do not commit to protecting 30% of their land and sea by 2030.
Of these, 21 countries did not supply a numerical target for protecting their land area, 26 set targets for land protection that were less than 30% and eight set land targets of or greater than 30%, but sea-protection targets less than 30%.
Of the remaining countries, 13 did not submit any targets relating to coverage of protected areas. Two others set goals further in the future than 2030.
A further 10 countries, or 7%, do not make it clear from the plans that they submitted whether or not they have a pledge that meets the conditions of 30 by 30. This includes: countries that specify that they will protect 30% of “areas of particular importance”; countries that gave a target for improvement, but did not provide a baseline; and countries that submitted only one or two targets.
Just 42% of countries – 57 in total – commit to protecting 30% of both land and sea by 2030.
The chart below shows the countries that have submitted NBSAPs and/or national targets to the UN. On the chart, countries are clustered by the percentage of land they have pledged to protect and the size of each bubble represents their land area. (Countries clustered around the 30% line and outlined in grey all have pledges to protect 30% of land area.)
Countries clustered below “no target” are those that have not pledged a numerical target for protecting their land or those who have produced a plan, but have not included a protected area target.
The analysis shows that, collectively, more than one-third of the Earth’s land area is covered by a pledge that does not fulfil the “30 by 30” target, while around half is covered by a “30 by 30” pledge.
Seven of the 17 “megadiverse” countries – which together provide a home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity – have not committed to 30 by 30, the analysis finds. This includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa and Venezuela.
A further 61 countries have not submitted an NBSAP or national targets and so have not been assessed in the analysis. This includes the world’s most biodiverse nation, Brazil.
The figures also do not include the US, which – although a megadiverse country – is not party to the CBD and, therefore, is not subject to the goals and targets of the GBF.
Former US president Joe Biden committed the country to the “30 by 30” pledge. However, the “Project 2025” policy blueprint – which Donald Trump is largely following – calls for the target to be scrapped.
The EU submitted an NBSAP that covers its 27 member states and commits to 30 by 30.
However, individual countries are also party to the CBD and are expected to submit their own national plans. For the purposes of this analysis, EU member states were only considered to be meeting “30 by 30” if they submitted their own NBSAP or national target that did so.
‘Extremely challenging’
Carbon Brief and the Guardian reached out to megadiverse countries and developed nations to ask why they had chosen not to commit to “30 by 30” in their UN plans.
Indonesia, a megadiverse country that is home to the world’s third-largest rainforest, did not give a numerical target for how much of its territory it is able to protect for nature in its NBSAP.
A government spokesperson says that it is Indonesia’s view that “it is not essential to explicitly state that the 30% protection target is for terrestrial and marine areas” in its territory, explaining:
“Indonesia is of the view that all of us need to understand that the GBF is indeed global. And, by being global, it is natural that this framework should be implemented globally and collectively, without putting an unnecessarily heavy burden on some of us.
“Indonesia is committed to ambitious yet practical targets for the GBF, with an emphasis on the fact that not all parties are at the same level if targets are assessed numerically.”
The spokesperson adds that “managing biodiversity is not an easy task” and that the “balance of economic, social and environmental aspects must be maintained, particularly for developing countries like Indonesia”.
In its NBSAP, megadiverse nation Mexico commits to protecting 30% of its oceans, but only 22% of its land.
Dr Andrea Cruz Angón, coordinator of biodiversity strategies and policies at Conabio, the federal government’s biodiversity commission, says that the targets are still “being reviewed and adjusted” by the appropriate federal agencies.
She adds that the targets were produced after workshops were held “with subnational governments, youth, Indigenous peoples and Afro-Mexican communities” to identify “barriers and opportunities for these actors to make voluntary commitments to the targets”.
Finland, one of the EU’s member states, has not yet released an NBSAP, but submitted its national targets for meeting the goals of the GBF to the UN in August 2024. In these plans, Finland does not commit to “30 by 30”.
A spokesperson for the Finnish government says it was still preparing its NBSAP and, as a result, none of its targets are final, but adds:
“Achieving a 30% increase in protected area by 2030 would be extremely challenging, as to reach this target, for example, the protected area in land areas would have to increase by about over 700,000 hectares per year.”
In its NBSAP, Norway committed to protecting 30% of its land for nature by 2030 – but says it was still assessing its ocean protection target and “will come back with a plan for how a future goal can be achieved in a way that also facilitates the sustainable use of Norwegian marine areas”.
A spokesperson for Norway says the nation is “committed to contribute towards the 30 by 30 target”, adding:
“A national conservation target for Norwegian sea areas has not yet been concluded. This is due to an ongoing national process to assess which marine areas that can be recognised as protected through ‘other effective area-based conservation measures’ (OECM), in accordance with [UN biodiversity] criteria.
“The conclusion of this process will clarify the current conservation status of Norwegian waters, and consequently enable us to set a national target.”
‘Go back to the drawing board’
Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, tells Carbon Brief and the Guardian that “30 by 30” is a “global target and how countries take that on board at the national level will be different across the world, depending on national circumstances”.
She points to the Protected Planet Report 2024, which shows that only 17.6% of land and 8.4% of the ocean is currently being conserved for nature – with just five years to go until the “30 by 30” deadline, adding:
“As the world faces a nature and biodiversity loss crisis, it is clear we must go much further, much faster. This will not be possible without financial, technical and capacity support for many countries.”
Responding to Carbon Brief and the Guardian’s investigation, Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, a group advocating for the 30 by 30 target, says:
“Many countries have not been ambitious enough with their domestic conservation commitments and, as a result, we are collectively not currently on track to meet the global ‘30 by 30’ target. This is troubling and action must be taken to put the world on track.”
To get on track for “30 by 30”, developed nations must “directly fund” the target to enable developing countries to protect more of their territories for nature, he says, adding that the “30 by 30” pledge also needs to be championed at a higher level by global leaders and the UN.
He adds that countries not committing to “30 by 30” in their UN plans “should go back to the drawing board and update their plans with ones in which conservation is commensurate with the challenge of biodiversity loss and the needs of communities”.
The full Carbon Brief and Guardian analysis can be found here.
The post Revealed: More than half of nations fail to protect 30% of land and sea in UN nature plans appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: More than half of nations fail to protect 30% of land and sea in UN nature plans
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.