Protected areas are expected to do more than prevent biodiversity loss. As countries work toward the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the goal of protecting at least 30% of the world’s land and waters by 2030, conservation areas are increasingly being asked to deliver multiple benefits, including climate mitigation.
Yet land available for conservation is limited, and protecting areas that are important for one objective doesn’t necessarily produce the same benefits for another. Conservation planning therefore requires understanding where priorities for biodiversity, carbon storage, and connectivity overlap, as well as where pursuing one goal may come at the expense of another.
Huang, Z., Fang, Z., Antonelli, A., Silvestro, D., Wang, J., Tan, Y., Li, J., Zhou, S., Ali, M., Lu, X. and Wang, R. 2026. Synergies and trade-offs for reaching global biodiversity and climate commitments. Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-76324-7
Recent research examined how different approaches to expanding protected areas could contribute to global biodiversity and climate commitments. Researchers compared strategies designed around individual objectives, including the diversity of five major taxonomic groups and carbon storage, with strategies that simultaneously considered biodiversity and carbon.
They evaluated these approaches under both current and future climate conditions for two conservation targets: protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 and 50% by 2050, sometimes referred to as the “Half Earth” goal. In addition to measuring how much species diversity and carbon could be represented, the researchers assessed the connectivity and cost-efficiency of the resulting protected area networks.
The results highlight both opportunities and trade-offs when conservation objectives are combined. Single-objective strategies represented an average of 42% of global species richness and 68% of carbon stocks across the two targets, while multi-goal strategies represented 44% and 67%, respectively.
Combining objectives slightly improved the overall performance of individual measures and reduced estimated conservation costs by about 2%. However, multi-goal strategies also reduced connectivity by over 2%, illustrating that optimizing for multiple outcomes can produce less connected conservation networks even when other measures of effectiveness improve.
These findings demonstrate why connectivity should be considered explicitly when developing large-scale conservation strategies. Simply increasing the amount of protected land does not guarantee that protected areas will form an effective network for wildlife movement or ecological processes.
Incorporating connectivity alongside biodiversity and carbon objectives could help planners identify areas that provide multiple benefits while maintaining functional connections across landscapes. As countries move toward 30×30 and longer-term conservation targets, the study shows that achieving several environmental goals simultaneously is possible, but doing so requires careful consideration of the trade-offs among them.
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