A new approach to conservation funding brings long-lasting solutions

Creating and managing protected and conserved areas—from national parks to Indigenous reserves and managed forests—is an incredibly effective way to reverse the loss of biodiversity and stabilize the climate. Not only do protected areas provide real, material benefits for the people who live in and around them—and upon whose stewardship they depend—but these places are often havens for rare species and store large quantities of carbon safely out of the atmosphere. Expanding protections that help end deforestation and adopting more sustainable land use practices can achieve about a quarter of the emissions reductions needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

And yet, only about 17% of land and 7% of oceans are currently reported as protected and conserved. That could soon change. This year, world leaders will consider a new global agreement to secure protected status for at least 30% of Earth’s lands, freshwater, and seas by 2030. The adoption of this “30x30” goal would help deliver on many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which include the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources, poverty alleviation, food security, and water quality. The 30x30 goal will be pursued through an equitable and inclusive process that respects the rights of the people who control much of that land.

Doubling Earth’s protected and conserved areas would be no small feat, and it’s worth noting that existing protected areas are already woefully underfunded. If world leaders are going to commit to expanding protections for nature, those protections have to amount to something more than words on paper. “We can’t just hope for the best,” explains Carter Roberts, CEO and president of WWF. “We have to plan for durability.”

“The first step,” Roberts says, “is to thoughtfully look at critical conservation landscapes as a whole and determine what these parts of the world need to remain healthy and intact. Then ask, what do they need in terms of protected areas and policy support? What do they need in terms of durable, local institutions that can monitor and deliver on performance-based funding? We need to engage Indigenous people and local communities and take time to listen. And understand how they want to see their knowledge and their relationships to nature reflected in the plans.”

“Finally,” he continues, “we need to take the long view, and to keep foremost in our minds the North Star that this mechanism moves us stepwise towards. And that is the vision of a future in which governments and communities within those areas are able to permanently manage them on their own.”

By working with WWF and other conservation groups to answer these questions, a government can create a road map to that self-sufficiency. Through the Bhutan for Life initiative, the Royal Government of Bhutan was able to develop just such a road map—complete with timetables, benchmarks for progress, and itemized costs—and present it to outside donors who ranged from individuals to foundations to other governments and multilateral institutions.

The investors pooled their resources to establish a performance-based “bridge fund” that the Bhutanese government has been gradually drawing from as they ramp up their own financing, with the goal of eventually assuming full financial responsibility for the management of their own lands and resources. To reduce risk for investors and ensure accountability, the funds only began to flow after the government made firm commitments, and they will keep flowing only so long as the government continues to meet the agreed-upon benchmarks.

At its core, this innovative funding mechanism—known as Project Finance for Permanence (PFP)—is about matching meaningful commitments by governments and other partners with the financing needed to fulfill those commitments. When you combine those two ingredients, as Bhutan has done so successfully, you have a recipe for lasting, large-scale conservation.

In 2008, the Royal Government of Bhutan took the bold step of enshrining protections for nature in its national constitution, which mandates that Bhutan conserve 60% of the country’s land as forest for all time. In the years that followed, the government fulfilled that promise: Today, roughly 72% of the nation remains under forest cover and over 51% is protected, making Bhutan the Asian country with the highest percentage of land designated as protected. What’s more, each year those forests absorb almost three times more CO₂ than Bhutan emits, making it one of the few countries in the world that have managed to be carbon negative.

“Bhutan’s commitment to sustainable development is grounded in our firm belief that the prosperity of a nation and its people must be measured not just in terms of economic progress, but also in ecological diversity, community vitality, health, quality education, culture, and good governance,” says Her Majesty Queen Jetsun Pema Wangchuck, Kingdom of Bhutan, an Ambassador of the WWF-US Board of Directors. “These are inextricably linked, and a harmonious balance must be ensured for true prosperity to be achieved.”

Extensive community and stakeholder conversations led the Bhutan for Life program to install biogas and other alternative energy technologies in rural areas to help people reduce their dependency on forest resources, decrease carbon emissions, alleviate poverty, and improve their respiratory health. The project also provided training in conservation and waste management activities to 79% of the population living in its protected areas.

Many of these efforts have focused on training young people and expanding opportunities for women and girls—in keeping with the idea that well-conceived conservation strategies must incorporate and meet people’s needs to be truly successful.

And in just four years, Bhutan for Life has implemented SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool) technology in all of Bhutan’s protected areas and wildlife corridors. SMART software uses data provided by government ranger patrols to analyze trends in local poaching and measure the effectiveness and accountability of antipoaching efforts. This cutting-edge technology enables park offices to identify at-risk areas and allocate limited resources where they are most needed, and it provides a road map that can be used to plan, adapt, and build capacity over time.

Finally, through Bhutan for Life, the country has sequestered 5 million tons of carbon dioxide. Imagine all of the CO₂ emissions released into the atmosphere to power over 500,000 homes for a year and you have a rough estimate of how much CO₂ pollution this tiny nation has managed to prevent, simply by keeping its forests intact. Now imagine what might be achieved—for nature, the climate, and communities—if other, larger nations took similar steps to safeguard their natural assets.