Ambition: The Power of a Big Idea and Sticking to it

Harvey agreed to extemporaneously announce, and justify, the aspirational vision to protect and interconnect half the Earth’s lands and seas. Nature Needs Half (natureneedshalf.org) was born. It was big, unexpected, and new. It was also designed differently, as an “open architecture, movement-style initiative with no proprietary ownership, just a steering committee to maintain standards. We were committed to the announcement yet a bit apprehensive, but the delegates were ready. It had been an ambitious Congress with many practical outcomes and calls to action, and this vison was a fitting send-off. Kenton Miller, former Director-General of the IUCN, and father of the original target of 10% protected terrestrial, asserted his approval from the floor. The great marine explorer and scientist, Sylvia Earle, immediately came up to me as I left the platform and said she had “an issue” with our announcement. I gulped and asked her to explain. “It’s not enough,” she said. Relieved, I hugged her.

But, in general, the trouble started. We had metaphorically thrown the visionary cat amongst the conservation-establishment pigeons. The feathers flew! We received emails from conservation professionals in institutions and NGOs asserting that such a target was impossible ecologically and/or politically. One such message from a prominent institutional figure even asserted that although the target may be scientifically correct, “we cannot insist for it because we will be laughed at!”

Integral to this call to “protect half” was that biodiversity and climate goals needed to be considered together, not separately. The Rio Earth Summit (1992) created a convention to deal with each issue. However, over time, these conventions drifted apart and became distinct agendas. They needed to be pulled together, therefore one aspect of WILD9 planning was to raise for the first time on a global conservation platform the need to integrate work on these two existential threats. So, as part of the planning for WILD9, Harvey and Brendan Mackey produced The Nature of Climate (Locke and Mackey 2009), one of the first formal calls for why ambitious (and scientifically-based) protection targets for biodiversity needed to be integrated with climate goals. Such a proposition was significant and way ahead of establishment conservation because at that time the climate movement had captured the general environ- mental movement. This made climate the priority of the institutional environmental movement, with biodiversity conservation the neglected cousin. Climate was all about energy and emissions, and what are now called nature-based solutions were considered quaint and old-school.

Fast-forward thru the next ten years. IJW came out with the first mainstream paper (Sylvén 2011) specifically devoted to and explaining the HALF concept. The NNH team persisted, yet, while many scientists agreed, few others (especially the big NGOs) would accept the obviously critical and important need for ambitious protected area tar- gets that would also be wedded to climate goals. Continuing our focus on this, we again made it part of the planning for the 10th World Wilderness Congress (WILD10 in Spain, 2013), and the Parks journal agreed to publish a comprehensive rationale for the HALF proposition (Locke 2013).

The tide began to strongly turn after Professor Ed Wilson published Half Earth in 2016, primarily a biodiversity-based call for HALF, and the weight of his name and scientific reputation provided a doorway to HALF for use by the latecomers. Most professionals began to understand that the HALF concept specifically responded to both massively accelerating species loss and to climate disruptions. Finally, “ambition” began to assume a place at the global conservation table. The NNH network expanded and the Wyss Campaign for Nature (www.wysscampaign.org) came out with the “30% by 2030” initiative. Soon, many in that movement began to recognize that “30 by 30” was a milestone on the way to HALF. The scientific underpinnings came thick and fast, with the stalwart Dr. Reed Noss publishing original research and the IUCN Task Force on “Beyond the Aichi Targets” (referring to the Convention on Biodiversity) produced the most extensive survey ever conducted of area-based conservation targets (Woodley et al 2019).