Solving biodiversity loss requires action on multiple fronts simultaneously: protecting more land and ocean, restoring degraded ecosystems, changing how we produce food, redirecting financial flows, and connecting fragmented habitats. No single intervention is enough because the problem has multiple drivers. Land and sea use change, primarily from expanding agriculture, is the dominant cause of biodiversity loss worldwide, followed closely by direct exploitation of natural resources through fishing, logging, hunting, and wildlife trade. Pollution ranks third, with climate change and invasive species playing smaller but growing roles.
The global community agreed on a roadmap in 2022. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework set 23 targets for 2030, anchored by a commitment to protect 30% of Earth’s land and ocean. But as of March 2025, only 17.5% of land and 8.5% of marine areas are formally protected or conserved. Closing that gap in five years is an enormous undertaking, and protection alone won’t be sufficient.
Protect More Land and Sea
The “30 by 30” target is the headline goal: conserve at least 30% of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine areas by 2030. Getting there means nearly doubling current land protections and more than tripling ocean coverage. But the framework specifies that these areas need to be ecologically representative, well-connected, and equitably governed. A patchwork of isolated parks won’t work if the ecosystems between them are degraded.
Achieving this requires recognizing indigenous and traditional territories as part of the conservation network. Indigenous peoples manage roughly a quarter of the world’s land surface, and much of it harbors higher biodiversity than surrounding areas. Formal recognition of these territories, with the consent and leadership of their communities, is one of the fastest ways to expand effective protection without displacing people.
For marine areas, the challenge is enforcement. Open-ocean protected zones are difficult to monitor, and illegal fishing remains widespread. Satellite tracking, vessel monitoring systems, and international cooperation agreements are essential tools for making marine protections meaningful rather than lines on a map.
Restore Degraded Ecosystems
Protection alone can’t reverse damage already done. The global framework calls for restoring at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal ecosystems by 2030. Restoration means different things in different contexts: replanting native forests, removing dams to reconnect river systems, reintroducing keystone species, or simply stepping back and letting natural processes take over.
Rewilding projects around the world show that ecosystems can recover when given the chance, though timelines vary enormously. In the Netherlands, a 700-hectare floodplain project called Millingerwaard started from a heavily altered baseline in 1990 and experienced substantial increases in ecological condition within a few decades. Argentina’s Iberá project, covering 150,000 hectares and running since 1999, has seen large mammal species return through ambitious reintroduction programs. Switzerland’s National Park, protected since 1914, demonstrates that ecological succession progresses steadily over a century when human pressures are removed. Across these projects, species richness and population viability of large animals increased consistently, driven by both active reintroductions and spontaneous recolonization.
The takeaway: restoration works, but it requires patience measured in decades, not election cycles.
Connect Fragmented Habitats
Even well-protected areas lose species over time if they’re isolated. Wildlife corridors, strips of habitat linking larger patches, allow animals to move, find mates, and maintain genetic diversity. Research using population modeling has found that even modest increases in corridor width substantially reduce genetic isolation between habitat patches and boost genetic diversity within them. This held true regardless of species type, dispersal ability, or population size.
Wider corridors are better, and short corridors work better than long ones for facilitating movement over practical timeframes. But the most important finding for conservation planners is this: even long, narrow corridors with low-quality habitat gave populations greater genetic resilience than patches with no connection at all. Something is dramatically better than nothing. In urban and suburban settings, corridors can take the form of stream buffers, greenways, highway underpasses, or chains of parks and gardens that together create a navigable landscape for wildlife.
Redirect Subsidies That Harm Nature
Governments spend more than $800 billion annually on subsidies that actively damage biodiversity. These include payments that encourage overfishing, incentivize clearing forests for agriculture, or make fossil fuels artificially cheap. This is more than four times the entire estimated biodiversity finance gap of $700 billion per year. In other words, the money to fund conservation already exists; it’s just flowing in the wrong direction.
The global framework calls for identifying and reforming these harmful subsidies by at least $500 billion per year. Practically, this means restructuring agricultural payments so they reward farmers for maintaining soil health, preserving hedgerows, and reducing chemical inputs rather than simply maximizing crop output. It means ending fuel subsidies for industrial fishing fleets that strip the ocean. Reform is politically difficult because these subsidies have powerful beneficiaries, but the math is stark: you can’t solve biodiversity loss while simultaneously paying to accelerate it.
Cut Pollution at the Source
The framework targets a 50% reduction in excess nutrients entering the environment by 2030 and a 50% reduction in overall pesticide and hazardous chemical risk. Nutrient pollution, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers, creates dead zones in waterways and oceans where almost nothing survives. Pesticides reduce insect populations, which cascades through food webs affecting birds, bats, fish, and amphibians.
Practical solutions include precision agriculture (applying fertilizer only where and when crops need it), integrated pest management that reduces reliance on chemical pesticides, buffer strips along waterways that filter runoff, and regulation of industrial discharges. Plastic pollution is also a target. Microplastics now appear in virtually every ecosystem on Earth, from deep ocean trenches to Arctic ice, and the framework calls for working toward eliminating plastic pollution entirely.
Change How We Eat and Consume
Because agriculture is the primary engine of land use change, what people eat directly shapes how much habitat survives. Meat production, especially beef, uses vastly more land per calorie than plant-based foods. Reducing food waste, which accounts for roughly a third of all food produced globally, would reduce pressure to convert more land to farming. Shifting diets even partially toward less land-intensive foods could free up enormous areas for restoration.
The global framework includes a target enabling sustainable consumption choices and reducing overconsumption. For individuals, this translates to choices about diet, purchasing, and waste. For governments, it means labeling standards, procurement policies, and economic incentives that make sustainable options the default rather than the exception.
Fund Conservation at Scale
Closing a $700 billion annual biodiversity finance gap requires both public and private money. The framework aims to mobilize at least $200 billion per year by 2030 through a mix of mechanisms: payments for ecosystem services, green bonds, debt-for-nature swaps (where countries reduce their debt in exchange for conservation commitments), and biodiversity credits.
Biodiversity credit markets are still in their early stages, and cautionary lessons come from carbon markets. Voluntary carbon markets peaked at $2.1 billion in transactions in 2021 but collapsed to $535 million by 2024 after widespread concerns about credit quality, additionality (whether the conservation would have happened anyway), and equity for local communities. Any biodiversity credit system will need stronger verification standards and community safeguards to avoid the same credibility crisis.
Monitor What’s Changing
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Traditional biodiversity surveys, where trained observers count species in the field, are expensive and slow. Environmental DNA (eDNA), a technique that detects species from trace genetic material left in water or soil, is transforming monitoring. A large meta-analysis found that eDNA methods are cheaper, more sensitive, and detect more species than traditional surveys across the majority of direct comparisons. This means conservation managers can track biodiversity changes across larger areas, more frequently, and at lower cost.
Satellite imagery, acoustic monitoring (recording bird and insect calls), and camera trap networks are also scaling up. Together, these tools make it possible to measure whether restoration projects are working, whether protected areas are actually protecting anything, and where new threats are emerging. Effective monitoring turns conservation from guesswork into adaptive management, where strategies get adjusted based on real data about what’s working and what isn’t.
What Makes the Difference
Every major analysis of biodiversity loss points to the same conclusion: the solutions are known and available. The barriers are political will, misaligned financial incentives, and the difficulty of coordinating action across nearly 200 countries. The most impactful lever is reforming the $800 billion in harmful subsidies, because it simultaneously removes a driver of destruction and frees up funds for conservation. The most urgent action is protecting the ecosystems that still harbor high biodiversity, because once a species is gone, no amount of funding brings it back. And the most underappreciated strategy is connectivity, ensuring that the habitats we do protect aren’t islands in a hostile landscape, but parts of a functioning network where life can move, adapt, and persist.