A funding decline, quantified
Annual international funding for protected and conserved areas worldwide fell from more than $1.2bn in 2023 to $1bn in 2025, according to the State of International 30×30 Funding: 2026 Update, a report published on 27 October by Campaign for Nature, the Pew Charitable Trusts and Rainforest Foundation Norway. Africa’s share of that funding fell even more sharply: the continent received about $389m in 2025, 32 percent below its 2022-2024 annual average, while funding to the world’s least-developed countries fell 28 percent over the same period.
The report breaks the decline down by type of conservation area. Terrestrial funding dropped roughly 30 percent to about $683m, while marine funding, already the smaller of the two categories at about $166m, remains, in the report’s own words, far below what is needed to protect ocean habitat at the scale the 30×30 target requires. Philanthropic funding, a category donors had hoped might offset falling government contributions, was itself 24 percent below its prior four-year average.
Who is still funding, and who is not
Germany remained the single largest bilateral donor in the 2025 data, contributing about $201m, while Canada’s contribution rose from $19m in 2023 to roughly $40m in 2025, a notable increase even if still modest against the overall shortfall. The report sets those figures against a $6bn-a-year benchmark it says would be needed to align international support with the 30×30 target, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s commitment to conserve at least 30 percent of the world’s land and sea by 2030.
Brian O’Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature, said funding for the 30×30 target is “headed in the wrong direction,” and argued that current funding levels reflect political priorities rather than conservation need. Steven Guilbeault, a senior adviser at Campaign for Nature and a former Canadian environment minister, said promised increases in support for the Global South have not kept pace with conservation ambition. Michael Owen, the report’s lead author and a partner at Sandstone Strategies, said the decade of growth in international conservation funding has stalled.
Timed to land during COP17
The report’s release, in the final days of COP17 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Yerevan, Armenia, was clearly timed to inform the summit’s financing discussions. COP17 closed on 30 October with a declaration and an approximately $1.8bn funding package aimed at helping lower-income countries build the monitoring and reporting systems the biodiversity framework requires, but delegates left the harder question of how to close the broader financing gap identified in the report largely unresolved.
A target still technically reachable, on paper
The report’s own modelling, the 2026 30×30 Global Assessment, projects that based on existing national commitments, about 27 percent of the world’s land and inland waters and 12 percent of its oceans will be protected by 2030, figures that fall short of, but are not wildly distant from, the 30 percent target itself. The report argues 30×30 remains achievable, but says doing so will require significantly more funding and ambition from governments and donors than current trends suggest, and proposes financing tools including Project Finance for Permanence agreements, the Legacy Landscapes Fund, dedicated trust funds, and debt-for-nature swaps as the most realistic near-term routes to closing the gap.
Related: COP17’s Yerevan Declaration addressed some of this financing gap directly, while Costa Rica’s silky shark export dispute illustrates the kind of enforcement capacity that conservation funding gaps leave underfunded on the ground.
