Lisbon, Portugal (30 June 2022) —As world leaders convene in Lisbon for the UN Ocean Conference, the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People (or HAC) announced that it has now reached a key milestone: over 100 countries have now joined the coalition to support protecting or conserving at least 30% of the world's land and ocean by 2030. Timor-Leste, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the United States of America, Estonia, Saint Lucia, Bahrain, Montenegro, and Burkina Faso are the most recent countries to join the intergovernmental effort.
More than half of the world’s countries now officially support the science-based 30x30 proposal, which has become the cornerstone of the draft agreement in development by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The 30x30 target has received a huge level of organized, governmental support.
Crucially, while still working to ensure that the 30x30 target is enshrined in a global agreement at COP15 this December in Montréal, the HAC is now also considering implementation. While the CBD process has been delayed for over two years, the global biodiversity crisis has only worsened. In light of this, HAC countries are increasingly focused on concrete actions to establish new protected or conserved areas and supporting Indigenous stewardship of important natural areas on land and in the ocean. As a coalition, the HAC has announced that it will stay together after COP15 in order to help support implementation of the 30x30 target.
The High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People was officially launched in January 2021 at the One Planet Summit on biodiversity, led by Costa Rica and France at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) pre-COP25 in San José in 2019. The coalition is currently co-chaired by Costa Rica, France, and the United Kingdom as ocean co-chair.