Public Strongly Backs Aim of 30% of Land and Sea Set Aside For Nature, Poll Finds (theguardian.com) 87
Much of the world favors protecting 30% of the world's land and water for nature by 2030, according to new research that has found overwhelming public support for the goal across eight countries on five continents. The Guardian: Nearly 200 nations agreed in 2022 to set aside 30% of the world's land and 30% of marine areas for nature. But just 17.6% of the world's land and 8.6% of the seas are now under global protection, and more than 100 nations are less than halfway to meeting the target, which was established under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Governments will need to implement swift changes if they are to achieve the target within the next five years. But setting aside more space for nature can be a political pitfall. Often it can mean restricting people's access to land, halting resource extraction and relocating human settlements. These issues, along with possible effects on economic growth, are often cited by countries as barriers to expanding protecting areas. Research published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, suggests that more than 80% of the public across eight sampled countries support the policy.
Governments will need to implement swift changes if they are to achieve the target within the next five years. But setting aside more space for nature can be a political pitfall. Often it can mean restricting people's access to land, halting resource extraction and relocating human settlements. These issues, along with possible effects on economic growth, are often cited by countries as barriers to expanding protecting areas. Research published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, suggests that more than 80% of the public across eight sampled countries support the policy.
Trump Challenge Accepted (Score:1, Funny)
Trump will see this as a challenge to pave over USA and declare plants as a dangerous risk to our health
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I fully support (Score:3, Funny)
Leveling my neighbor's house so I can have a better view of nature out my window.
Re:I fully support (Score:4, Insightful)
This. These people aren't thinking about losing access to their own property, just some nebulous other people's 30%. Make it personal, and the survey would come out very differently.
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I mean in the US, the government already owns about 28% of all the land - most of that largely undeveloped. Its not really that hard to just say "keep that publicly owned land public and don't build anything on it". Or at least keep building to a minimum (eg hiking trails with an occasional bathroom along the way).
Re: I fully support (Score:1)
Yeah sure. I live outside of Boston. A famously supply-limited housing market where rent for a multibedroom runs into the several thousand and half a million is the low end of the market for single family homes.
This is supposed to be bad.
I also live right next to thousands of acres of federally-owned wildlife refuge. And thousands of acres of state and town owned conservation land. None of which can be built on, and only a small fraction of which may be used for recreation.
This is supposed to be good.
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Blame the bullshit zoning laws. There is plenty of housing to be had vertically, we don't need to destroy the entire natural world so everyone has a place to live.
Re: I fully support (Score:2)
Blame venture capital and Airbnb. There are multiple empty housing units for every person in the country. There are even sufficient empty housing units for every homeless person in California. But they are not on the market because they are not unaffordable to keep empty. And therefore also hold politicians responsible for not creating laws which make this unprofitable.
Re: I fully support (Score:2, Informative)
Most of the homeless in California are homeless because no landlord of any multifamily dwelling would rent to them. Even if the government picked up the tab no questions asked, the other rent-paying tenants who actually have their shit together would strenuously object to living next door to crazies, drunks, and drug addicts.
Time was, we would lock up the crazies who couldn't fend for themselves. So they wouldn't be getting themselves in trouble but also so they wouldn't be causing trouble for normal people
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Most of the homeless in California are in that position for economic reasons. The loss of a job is number one. That can be from a sudden illness or accident, a layoff or an unexpected car problem. Without being able to quickly replace the income with a new job, people get evicted and start living in their car or on the street.
Mixed in with people who could sort themselves out if they only had a place to live; are people who are a hot mess. Due to addiction or mental illness they aren't going to seek out hel
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I don't give two shits about your thoughts on the minority of the population.
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Most of the homeless in California are homeless because no landlord of any multifamily dwelling would rent to them. Even if the government picked up the tab no questions asked, the other rent-paying tenants who actually have their shit together would strenuously object to living next door to crazies, drunks, and drug addicts.
Are you serious with this? Skittish landlords are the reason for California's housing crisis? There's a housing shortage, that's why our housing costs are even worse than yours. People on the margins who could afford housing in most states are homeless here because housing is so expensive. This is a known thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
Re: I fully support (Score:1)
No. Not skittish landlords...drug-addled, unhygenic, crime magnet would-be tenants.
Follow along.
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Follow along.
I have been, all you're doing here is rewording what I said and pretending it's different.
All places have homeless people. Why would California and only California suddenly have a problem with people not wanting to rent to them? Why would your scenario be unique to California?
Never mind I've already shown you proper citation for where we know the homeless problem to be coming from
Re: I fully support (Score:1)
Find where it even me that brought California into the conversation, let alone implied it was uniquely California homeless who were particularly bad.
I was responding to a post about California and continuing on topic. As one does.
Wow.
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Find where it even me that brought California into the conversation, let alone implied it was uniquely California homeless who were particularly bad.
Except no one was being critical of you bringing California up because of course you didnt. I in fact did.
I'm being critical of what you're saying about California because it's nonsense you made up that doesn't even sound realistic when one reads it and then you double downed on it when called on it like you were certain of it. Now I'm being more critical of you because you've made up this victim thing of "i was just responding" that doesnt even make sense. I know you were responding to what I said, it's th
Re: I fully support (Score:2)
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Do you have a citation for your declaration that most California homeless are hobos because they lost their job? My cousin was homeless in California for around 20 years because he wanted to be. He led me to believe that that was common.
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Fair enough for most places. Places like Silicon Valley though should have gone vertical decades ago. At this point they're disrupting the better part of Northern California's real estate market. For Boston getting rid of Airbnb and real estate investment might do the trick though.
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There are even sufficient empty housing units for every homeless person in California. But they are not on the market because they are not unaffordable to keep empty.
I'm a little lost what you mean. Removing the double negative, they're affordable to keep empty? What's the scenario you're thinking of: a landlord buys a house or building and decides the incremental cost of renting out a unit is greater than the rent?
I've heard of people say they don't want to buy a property because they don't think they can rent it out for enough. Once they're made the purchase (and for everything but abandoned properties, every building is owned by someone who has made a purchase), I've
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What's the scenario you're thinking of[?]
If I remember correctly, corporations buy housing (sometimes entire subdivisions), and refuse to sell them or rent them out. I think the strategy is to create an artificial housing scarcity to justify jacking up rents on other properties. The excessive rents of their other properties more than pay for the costs of keeping the unrented properties unoccupied.
So yes, it is cheaper for the companies to buy large tracts of developed housing and keep them unoccupied than it is to rent them. In the distant past, b
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I'm a little lost what you mean.
The expected eventual profit, or the ongoing profit from having them mostly empty most of the time but then very expensive when they are occupied for brief moments. Or just functioning as a vacation home for just one family. I'm not completely against people having vacation homes, but I want everyone to have a home first.
I don't think they all need to have a home in the state of their choice necessarily, though I don't think natives of a particular state should be asked to move. But we've got more than enou
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The expected eventual profit, or the ongoing profit from having them mostly empty most of the time but then very expensive when they are occupied for brief moments. Or just functioning as a vacation home for just one family.
OK, I understand your point. I don't agree with it but I understand it.
Let's try this: if it's profitable to rent my property for four weeks out of the year, why wouldn't it be even more profitable to rent it eight? It's costing me the same amount to own and maintain, more or less, regardless of what I choose.
Ignore for now that if everyone keeps their properties off the market, the price can be made artificially high. That's collusion, it's illegal, and it's very, very hard to pull off. Each landlord has a
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Increasing housing supply won't "trickle down" into lower housing costs. That's not how it works, but it's the myth that armchair economists, real estate investors, and politicians love to tell us.
The only way to have affordable rent and affordable houses is to regulate them. Allowing the free market continue to decide the price on a necessary resource is not likely to automatically push prices down. Because the people who own a home, be it a single home or an investor that owns an entire development, they
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Increasing housing supply won't "trickle down" into lower housing costs. That's not how it works, but it's the myth that armchair economists, real estate investors, and politicians love to tell us.
How do you figure? If I build more luxury houses, that lets rich people move out of more modest dwellings, freeing them up for people of more modest means. What makes you think that won't happen? It seems kind of inevitable to me.
The problem is there's so much pent up housing demand, it'll take a lot of building before prices measurably decline. What I'd expect to se first is the inventory of expensive houses start to increase and sales cycles lengthen. Only when houses are on the market for months before s
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How do you figure? If I build more luxury houses, that lets rich people move out of more modest dwellings, freeing them up for people of more modest means. What makes you think that won't happen? It seems kind of inevitable to me.
Such a thing has never happened before. So why would you keep expecting it to work that way?
It should be obvious that building luxury housing during an affordability crisis does not directly address the immediate problem. Regardless of your position on this issue. Even if you believe in trickle-down you'd have to admit there is a time lag between moving out of the modest home and into the luxury home.
And there is a side-effect of an affordability crisis to consider; That the middle and working-class are get
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Such a thing has never happened before.
I do not believe that is the case. Sadly, I do not have data handy but recall reading about studies showing that's exactly what happens.
So why would you keep expecting it to work that way?
Because that's how every other market works? Because of the chain of reasoning I put in my post (if you build more luxury houses, rich people move to them and that reduces demand for the houses they used to live in, which reduces the price for those houses)?
It should be obvious that building luxury housing during an affordability crisis does not directly address the immediate problem.
Absolutely. It's an indirect solution. And yes, of course there is a lag. It takes time to build houses, for people to
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What is this "property" of which you speak? (Score:2)
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Oh wait, the median age of a US homeowner is 42. https://ipropertymanagement.co... [ipropertymanagement.com]. That means that HALF of US homeowners are younger than 42.
Maybe your dystopia isn't as real as you thought.
It's almost like... (Score:5, Insightful)
...Individual people actually see a value in not destroying the planet and everything that lives on it.
Pretty obvious why corporations and (some) governments don't, especially when the corporation has a hand in the operations of the government.
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Sure, as long as that protection doesn't affect *their own* property. They support this protection as long as it's somebody else that loses out on access to land (or water).
Dystopian (Score:5, Insightful)
Only 30%? That's a dystopian nightmare. Imagine the world 70% covered with cities, oil rigs, and roads.
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Imagine it's your 70% that's torn down to make room for more nature.
Re: Dystopian (Score:3)
We only use like 1% of the world's area. No need to kick anyone out of their homes.
Re:Dystopian (Score:5, Informative)
It says 30% for "nature" - not 30% that isn't urbanized parking lot. The remaining 70% can be all sorts of utilized stuff that isn't really natural. EG farming takes up a lot of space. Its not natural, but I don't think anyone is too put off by a corn field or a peach orchard visually.
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Though I suspect the respondents didn't really think about this for very long. How would they set aside a third of the UK, move everyone out of Scotland?
Re:Dystopian (Score:4, Funny)
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poobah (Score:2)
It's just posturing. None of them will actually do anything about it.
But, as Brexit and Trump have taught us... (Score:2)
Yet another political football (Score:2)
What a load of crap. You know that whoever gets to decide what gets walled off from all of humanity forever is going to use it as a political weapon. Oh, you want to mine rare earth metals? Did you contribute to my last campaign? No? Well, then I guess that chunk of land with all the rare earths is going to be set aside for nature. STBY. Now if you'll excuse me, my taxpayer funded via an NGO private jet is waiting to take me to my estate in Hawaii.
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Maybe it depends on where you live but in the US and a lot of larger countries this isn't THAT difficult to achieve. Like in the US there something like 10% more area covered by forest now than there was ~1900 because some former farm area was abandoned.
Also, exploitation for minerals CAN be a small enough intrusion that most of "nature" wouldn't care anyway. i.e. from the POV of plants and animals if you have a couple of mines ( even massive pit mines ) in areas of thousands of square miles... they
It's one thing to think about this as a concept (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's one thing to think about this as a concept (Score:5, Informative)
Why should one have to forfeit it? We pay taxes for a reason. Any land that isn't already publicly owned and set aside for this purpose could be purchased from the current owners willingly (if they don't want to sell, buy equivalent acreage from someone who does).
Taxes are literally the way for all of us to collectively do things that it would be too financially painful to do individually.
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We have that near where I live. About 180 square miles, supposedly blocked from public access as a watershed for the cities water supply. In reality, a private hunting and recreation reserve for rich fuckers in Land Rovers.
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I don't have an issue with using natural land for hunting or recreation. Hunting when bag limits are set and laws are guided by biologists isn't harmful to an area.
Humans are a part of nature. Our structures and creations are not. Us going out and walking in the forest or taking a limited amount of game (basically legally limiting humans to an amount of predation that is sustainable) isn't throwing the ecosystem out of whack.
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Until someone comes after you to fund the purchase of that 30%. And then tells you that you aren't one of the select few who gets the key card for the electronic gate.
Vote for the correct party next time.
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Why should one have to forfeit it?
Because people are often currently using ecologically important land and water. Marine reserves are a great example. People like to fish where the fish breed because, well, that's where the fish are. If you want to create a marine reserve, you want to protect where the fish breed. It's very difficult to imagine being able to protect breeding grounds and allow fishing.
Same with land. Farmers want to farm the most productive land but that's often where very interesting and dynamic ecosystems arise. I can't pr
Polls don't vote (Score:3)
Also what matters is who gets to vote. The supreme Court dismantled the voting Rights act. And voter suppression is now off the hook with millions of people unable to vote because of illegal signature and voter registration challenges and millions more unable to vote because of multi-hour wait times at polls.
Stalin was wrong it's not who counts the votes that matters, it's who gets to vote.
Polls do not matter for most of earth (Score:2)
The powerful are hardly impacted by popular opinion. 95+% of Americans want minimal gun restrictions and close to ZERO gets done (any gains are undone within 8 years.)
Stalin was still right; he was just so used to being openly evil. You indirectly control the count by controlling WHO can be counted... Even more subtle (or oblivious to slow people) you group voters such that you choose the voters instead of them choosing: gerrymander. Take away voting rights (slaves, convicts, immigrants.)
Yes, I would give
I think the thing you're missing (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if 95% of people want more gun restrictions if all it takes is a two-week ad blitz threatening to take away guns entirely to scare them into voting for tough on crime politicians who are going to stab them in the back economically.
People prioritize certain things at certain times based on certain bits of information put in front of them. Often that information is propaganda. It has been re
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Also, the signature and registration challenges ARE legal. They are an anti-cheating mechanism. A necessary one, really.
Are you familiar with what happened in Alabama? In 2011 Alabama instituted a voter ID law restricting the forms of ID required to vote to a very small list, primarily relying on the Department of Motor Vehicles, which issues drivers licenses. The politicians argued that this was not an barrier to voting, because even if poor people don't own or drive cars, they could still get a government-issued ID at any Department of Motor Vehicles office. The very next year, Alabama closed all of the DMV offices in eigh
I can't remember where, maybe Mississippi (Score:2)
They destroyed the law (Score:2)
The fact that you don't understand that it was the only thing between you and widespread voter suppression should you ever disagree with the ruling class and the ruling elite is your problem now.
You have some ideas you probably picked up when you were a kid that you need to deconstruct. Good luck with that. America's democracy is counting on you
Thought we already had that. (Score:3)
Total land area 149e6 sq km, 30% of that is 50e6 sq km. Antarctica is 14e6 sq km and off limits so that's a good portion of cordoning off land. Siberia is another 14e6 sq km, now we are up to ~30 sq km. The total area of all national parks is 18.8e6 sq km bringing the total to ~50 million sq km. So yeah, already there.
I'd imagine that the ocean is easy to free up space since most of it isn't being utilized.
I hope these people can rest easy because we already have what they want.
Re:Thought we already had that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Antarctica I'd say doesn't really count towards the percentage total. You'd need 30% per region, not 30% of all the land on the planet with a large percentage of that being just the land that isn't of human use.
Antarctica is damned near uninhabitable. Very little plant life and the animal life is relegated to coastal semi-aquatic animals. The interior is devoid of complex life.
Of course in global warming keeps up in a few thousand years it might be a great place to live - with everyone claiming to have "set aside" the nearly uninhabitable areas at the equator :).
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And how much of this matters? Is Brazil and her neighbors going to cordon off the Amazon? Nope! This is an idea that means nothing, because the only people who share it are in places where it doesn't matter. Brazilians want the land currently occupied by the Amazon for other things. Not one person polled by The Guardian can change t
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Antarctica I'd say doesn't really count towards the percentage total. You'd need 30% per region, not 3...
Not having read the poll, I strongly suspect it didn't ask "Should we set aside 30% of the land within 100 miles/km of your house?" I further strongly suspect people answering "yes" just sort of assumed it would have no effect on them personally.
It's the same as tariffs. Lots of people are in favor of them in general. When you explain they can't buy things from Etsy and their Amazon purchases will get 15% more expensive, support drops like a rock.
Followup question? (Score:3)
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Would YOU be willing to give up 30% of your land and property to be set aside for nature?
Done. More than three quarters of my place is left as wild forest. We have bear, cougar and bald eagles hanging around.
About those bald eagles: They don't really require wilderness. We have a couple of them that hang out in trees next to I-405, waiting for road kill. They also built a nest on top of the cellular companies 3G tower. Which blocked them from upgrading that site to 5G. Or get cited for interfering with the nest. Hence, shitty 5G coverage at my house.
Such noble [vice.com] birds.
Wow... (Score:3)
Lots of people posting here saying something like "If they had to give up their land, then blah blah blah.
That sounds to me like a lot of people who don't give a flying fuck about nature trying to make themselves feel better by pretending that, deep down inside, everybody else is just as bad as they are.
You know what ? It would be perfectly possible to put 30% of the world's total land area under some form of protection without anybody losing their land. In some countries it could even be as much 90%, which could easily compensate for those who couldn't, like some european countries.
Even in the US, off the top of my head, I think almost 30% of total territory is public lands, and that's not even taking into account state-owned lands, first nations land, etc. In fact the US was a pioneer in land protection, even inventing the concept of national parks.
But that was a long time ago. Before the dark times, Before the Empire.
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My first thought was, "Oh, so Antarctica, the Sahara, the Gobi... am I at 30% yet? No? Then whatever Tundra doesn't have oil or metal underneath."
All that could be protected and nobody would notice. Or care. There are a lot of places we can't really live and wouldn't want to work. I doubt that's the sort of outcome the proponents would have wanted, but then it's their fault for rubbing a lamp without t
Several years ago ... (Score:2)
I just thought how the person just down the road had been thinking the same thing before Mr Big Shot moved in. And, if the designation falls through, the next pe
Nature is a means to a cause (Score:2)
For the moment biosphere collapse must be prevented to save civilisation, but elevating conservation to an inherent moral good goes too far.
Leave the knee jerk conservationism to the conservatives, be a little more progressive. Friends don't let animal friends be eaten alive by predators and parasites if they can help it, nor die for that matter. Eventually nature must go, it's the only moral outcome.
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Was
AWESOME!
Very funny, thank you.
City Dwellers (Score:2)
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Don't have to. The city/county/state/fed can just invoke eminent domain and pay fair market value instead of whatever inflated sentimental price people think they can demand.
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Start with undeveloped non-privately-held areas (Score:1)
Don't mess with privately-held land or water or land or water that's already being used for something or is planned for future use: Start with government-owned land and water, international waters, and land not owned by any nation-state that's not already developed or planned for some other use.
That will relieve some of the naysayers.
Almost all of the major oceans are international waters. Antarctica is covered by treaties already.
Within nation-states, there are government-owned lands and waters that are
Drill baby drill!! (Score:2)
Generalities are easy. Specifics are hard. (Score:2)
I'm sure anyone can look at the globe, or even their region, and come up with at least 30% they'd be happy setting aside for nature. I sure can.
The problem is that we're going to disagree over which 30%.
Ranchers: the 30% which isn't suitable for grazing.
Oil barons: the 30% which doesn't have oil underneath.
Miners: the 30% which doesn't have useful ore.
Fishing fleets: the 30% which we've already depleted of fish.
Developers: any 30% we don't own and want to put houses on.
PG&E: the 30% we don't need to ru
Farming (Score:2)
70% of farm land is devoted to raising animals or feed for animals.
One tenth of the land devoted to animal agriculture could grow more calories and protein than the current animals produce.
Lots of potential there to re-wild farm land.
No-one will paly (Score:2)
Well, maybe (Score:2)
Capitalism and carnivores disagree (Score:2)
The public are not the ones in power, and the public believes putting an X in a box every few years is democratic, and that polls and petitions work.
This is of course not true. Capitalism is keeping us on a trajectory that will lead to socio-economic collapse, climate breakdown and mass extinction - currently with only a 5% chance of changing course.
Know this - This civilsation is toast.