Two conservation targets have drawn wide attention in recent years. The 30×30 initiative aims to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and water by 2030. E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth proposal goes further, calling for protection of 50 percent of Earth’s surface to preserve approximately 80 percent of species.

Colcom Foundation, an independent nonprofit in Pittsburgh, has applied its biocapacity analysis to both goals. The results appear on a resource page summarizing the Foundation’s origins and conservation approach.

What Protection Does to the Math

The Foundation’s baseline comes from Global Footprint Network data. The United States was consuming about 240 percent of its available biocapacity as of 2020, up from 227 percent in 1970. The Foundation then adjusts those figures for each conservation target. Under 30×30, effective U.S. biocapacity utilization reaches roughly 341 percent. Under Half-Earth, it rises to about 478 percent.

Those numbers suggest how far consumption already exceeds what domestic ecosystems can supply, and how much wider the gap becomes once large areas are set aside for nature.

The comparison helps explain why the Foundation pays close attention to these targets. Even before any new land is protected, Americans use well over twice what domestic ecosystems regenerate each year. Expanding protected areas, a widely supported conservation goal, makes the remaining productive land carry an even heavier load.

Complementary Goals

Colcom Foundation points to a 2021 paper by Crist and colleagues in Frontiers in Conservation Science. The authors concluded that protecting half the planet and transforming human systems are complementary and mutually necessary goals.

For the Colcom Foundation, the takeaway is that land protection and population size belong in the same conversation. Its framework, the I = P x A x T equation developed by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, holds that environmental impact reflects population, per capita consumption, and technology together. Addressing only the last two, the Foundation contends, caps what conservation targets can achieve in aggregate. See related link for additional information.

Find more information about Colcom Foundation on https://waterlandlife.org/land-conservation/colcom-revolving-fund-for-local-land-trusts/