US states take up conservation goals axed by Trump

• Trump ended '30x30' conservation initiative
• Now local governments want to go further
• Conservation wins votes in local elections

WASHINGTON - With a snappy title and a laudable goal, "30 by 30" was a landmark plan hatched to help save at least 30% of the planet's land and oceans by 2030.    

Alongside this multinational push, the United States had its own trailblazing version of 30x30 and Americans came to see conservation as an effective - and fairly straightforward - way of helping win wider climate pledges.

Four years down the line and that yen to restore and conserve nature lives on - despite President Donald Trump axing the U.S. 30x30 initiative - only now it is down to states to lead U.S. efforts to save wildlife, forests and waters.

“Even if 30x30 has been erased by a Trump executive order, there's progress in the states,” said Drew McConville of the Center for American Progress, a policy institute that backs the 30x30 goals. “Is the momentum dead, or has it just shifted?”

The global pledge was officially born in 2022, aiming to curb biodiversity loss worldwide by protecting more natural areas such as parks, seas, forests and wildernesses. 

Signed by 196 nations at a global summit, the plan came to life a year after the United States had launched its own 30x30 drive.

But on Day One of retaking office, Trump ditched the 30x30 goals, denying federal funds to projects across the country – such as efforts in Vermont to retain the state's leafy reputation.

Despite being one of the most forested states in the United States, Vermont had been losing trees at a worrying pace, with more than 300,000 acres projected gone by mid-century.

Under the new focus brought by 30x30, efforts to reverse that decline had received a boost.

"I was expecting with federal support there would be money and support for planning and local implementation, and even the purchase of property," Vermont State Senator Rebecca White told Context.

"That has changed."

So now state officials in Vermont and beyond are looking to take up the slack, building on the support that more than 450 state and local leaders gave 30x30 when it was first rolled out.

Proponents say it is money well spent.

"Taxpayers get the value of biodiversity," White said. "They want to keep seeing maple trees growing in our state."

She and her colleagues have moved well beyond the 30% mark and are now chasing a more audacious aim: conserving half of the state's lands by mid-century in a 50x50 drive.

The state is finishing up phase one of that plan, drawing up an inventory that will help shape their future efforts.

A U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson said the agency continues to advance conservation and recreation priorities, including $437 million to support locally led projects, and $250 million to revitalize public lands.

Yet the administration has also opened up public lands to mining and petroleum extraction, mandated more logging and raised fears of broader land sales to come.

Local leaders are meanwhile expanding conservation work.

In October, Oregon's governor put in place a new climate strategy that includes a goal to protect 10% of its most “climate-resilient” lands and waters in the next decade.

"This mandate takes on even more urgency with federal inaction from the Trump Administration," Anca Matica, a spokesperson for Governor Tina Kotek, said in an email.

And more such efforts are expected, said Dylan McDowell, chief executive of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, which says nine states are implementing 30x30 goals.

‘War time’

Local conservation groups say the changed federal priorities are prompting unprecedented changes.

These are especially affecting new efforts to bring poor and marginalised communities into conservation work, said Teresa Martinez, executive director of the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, a nonprofit based in Santa Fe.

"One of the most important symbols of a free democracy is access to this public land system. And it's an assault on our ability to access for free the things we should have access to," she said in a group phone interview with a dozen members of the America the Beautiful for All Coalition, a network that works to equitably advance the 30x30 goals.

She and others report being too afraid to gather for work on public lands out of fear of immigration raids, shifting recent meetings to private property.

Funding problems are also becoming existential.

“We know of three organisations that we used to regularly partner with and who have since closed,” said Ángel Peña, head of the Nuestra Tierra Conservation Project, which works in New Mexico.

“One of our best partners just took out a loan just to keep the lights on. It’s war time.”

At the same time, even in states that Trump won in 2024, such as Florida and South Carolina, conservation measures remain local mainstays.

Last year, voters approved all 23 ballot measures tracked by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, creating over $16 billion for parks and conservation.

In this month’s elections, residents in six states - including Idaho and Pennsylvania - again approved conservation measures worth $1.9 billion, according to TPL.

"From a bond and ballot measure perspective, there are green shoots coming up," said Brendan Shane, the group’s climate director.

He expects that to continue, in part as conservation is increasingly discussed in the wider context of climate action.

“For any number of states, it’s a really big potential and relatively low-cost opportunity.”

Global impact

Increasingly, local U.S. officials are bypassing national routes and looking also to affect conservation efforts globally.

In August, California lawmakers unanimously passed a resolution to have the state investigate its role in oil imports from the Amazon, urging an end to the practice.

"Extraction in the Amazon has been pretty devastating. The oil industry is a major driver of deforestation," said Kevin Koenig, a director with Amazon Watch.

The advocacy group supported the resolution in California, a major crude oil importer particularly from Ecuador.

"California can show that in the face of lack of action on the national or world level, jurisdictions can take some things into their own hands."

The state is now finalising the investigation's details.

And in October, California and Massachusetts said that they would become the first U.S. states to join the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a 1,400-member network of governments and NGOs.

The state has almost reached the 30x30 goal, but an August plan raises that to preserve 40% of land by 2050.

In June, the governor also introduced a nearly $3 billion resilient infrastructure bill that would speed up restoring waterways and salt marshes, among other conservation priorities.

That focus on going beyond conservation to boost restoration is key, said Tom O’Shea, commissioner of the state’s Department of Fish & Game, pointing to a restored Massachusetts river where herring have returned for the first time in two centuries.

"People cried," O’Shea recalled. "What you’re seeing is an opportunity to make things better than they have been in the past, and what we’ve done to the landscape can be healed.

(Reporting by Carey L. Biron; Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths and Anastasia Moloney.)