COP17 exposed the gap between global biodiversity commitments and implementation. America's elections have created an opportunity to build the conservation policies and institutions needed to close it.
Last night, American voters delivered a resounding electoral rebuke to Donald Trump and his far-right administration.
Democrats won control of both houses of Congress, captured Republican-held governorships, and gained power in state legislatures across the country. Their victories extended beyond traditionally Democratic constituencies into states and districts Trump carried only two years ago. The results represent a dramatic shift in political power, even if it is too soon to know whether they mark a lasting ideological realignment (Associated Press; Reuters).
But defeating an administration's policies at the ballot box is not the same as establishing a new governing agenda.
The election opened a door. What follows will depend on how elected officials use their authority and what the public expects them to accomplish.
COP17: The Implementation Challenge
The seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17) convened in Yerevan, Armenia, October 19-31, 2026, with representatives of 182 Parties registered to attend.
The conference conducted the first global review of progress under the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022 to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
The review found that the world remains off track to meet the Framework's 23 targets for 2030.
In response, countries adopted the Yerevan Pathway, calling on governments to turn their biodiversity commitments into national policies, public investment, and measurable results. That means changing policies and subsidies that damage nature, directing more funding toward conservation, and establishing stronger systems for tracking progress.
International agreement can establish shared direction. Implementation depends on what governments do at home.
That message is relevant to the United States even though it has never ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity and is not bound by COP17's decisions. The United States signed the Convention in 1993, but the Senate never consented to ratification. (NOAA)
Congress and state governments can act through their own authorities, creating conservation policies and institutions capable of surviving changes in presidential administrations.
But what should those policies seek to accomplish?
A Commitment Worth Making
Conservation science has spent decades examining how much space biodiversity needs. Although no single threshold applies everywhere, the evidence points toward conservation at a much larger scale than we have achieved to date.
The scientific literature synthesized in Designing Nature's Half places estimates of terrestrial conservation need between roughly 44 percent and more than 60 percent, depending on what is measured and how conservation need is defined. Dinerstein and colleagues (2019) proposed a Global Deal for Nature combining protection of 30 percent of the planet with an additional 20 percent designated as climate-stabilization areas, advancing a pathway toward conserving half by 2050.
Together, this evidence supports 50 percent by 2050 (50×50) as a defensible, precautionary benchmark for ecological sufficiency—not a guarantee that conserving exactly half will be enough everywhere.
But the amount of land conserved is only part of the equation. What we conserve, its ecological condition, and how those places connect across landscapes all matter.
Climate change makes those ecological requirements even more important. Species need room to persist, move, and reorganize as ecological conditions change across landscapes. Functioning landscapes can also help communities adapt to climate impacts while retaining carbon stores, avoiding emissions from ecosystem conversion, and sustaining biological carbon removal.
50×50 brings ecological sufficiency, climate adaptation, and climate mitigation together within one landscape-scale commitment.
But establishing that commitment is only the beginning.
From Conservation Targets to Landscape Decisions
Rivers cross state boundaries. Wildlife moves across public and private lands. Ecological connections extend through working landscapes and multiple jurisdictions. Climate change makes those relationships increasingly important.
Conservation must operate at the scale of the ecological systems it seeks to sustain.
That requires bringing stakeholders with different rights, authorities, knowledge, and interests into an integrated, multi-jurisdictional decision space.
No single agency, landowner, or organization can determine the future of an entire landscape. Together, however, stakeholders can develop a common understanding of what that landscape needs.
Stakeholders need a reliable picture of the landscape they share. That requires interdisciplinary assessment combining scientific evidence with their knowledge of the places where they live and work. Together, they can examine current ecological conditions, changing climate risks, and the social and economic needs that shape land-use decisions, while considering plausible futures.
With that information, they can explore different ways development and conservation might be organized across the landscape.
Where should ecological strongholds remain intact? Where must habitat connections be maintained or restored? Where can communities and economic activities develop without undermining the ecological functions the larger landscape needs?
Comparing those alternatives allows stakeholders to identify a preferred landscape configuration.
But identifying that configuration is not enough.
Stakeholders must then determine how they can contribute to realizing that configuration: what actions they could undertake, what resources they could provide, and how their separate contributions could be coordinated. Together, those choices establish shared implementation direction.
Those contributions remain subject to their respective authorities and subsequent binding decisions.
Together, these steps constitute landscape conservation design (LCD), an integrated decision architecture for developing a preferred landscape configuration and shared implementation direction.
But shared implementation direction does not itself establish the authority, obligations, financing, or accountability needed for implementation.
Building the Policy Architecture
Congress should begin creating the legal, financial, and institutional conditions needed to make this kind of landscape-scale conservation possible.
Congress could establish a national 50×50 commitment in law, with interim milestones and assessments identifying where ecological protection, connectivity, climate adaptation, and restoration are most needed.
Making that commitment real would require federal and state agencies, Tribal Nations, private landowners, and other landscape stakeholders to align their interests, programs, and investments around landscape-scale outcomes. It would also require sustained funding for protection, conservation management, and restoration across working lands and waters and conservation areas.
Regional institutions could help stakeholders organize implementation across jurisdictions while retaining their existing authorities. Public reporting would make it possible to judge progress by ecological condition, connectivity, management effectiveness, and durability—not merely acres counted.
The Work Ahead
The science is clear. The international conservation policy framework is in place. And landscape conservation design provides a practical approach for determining how conservation commitments can be pursued across the nation's landscapes.
What's missing is the political commitment to put those pieces together.
The November 3 election has created an opportunity to address the conservation policy gap that exists at the national level. Democrats will control both houses of Congress when the new session begins in January. Legislation may face a presidential veto, but that constraint does not prevent Congress from developing a national conservation agenda.
The conservation community has an important role in that process. Its organizations, scientists, landscape partnerships, and other participants can bring the scientific case for 50×50 into public debate and present Congress with a coherent vision of what a national conservation commitment would require.
That means advocating for more than additional protected acreage. A national 50×50 framework would need to recognize ecological sufficiency and climate action as connected objectives, establish landscape conservation design as a means of developing conservation priorities across jurisdictions, and provide the legal authority, financing, and accountability needed for implementation.
The work must also extend beyond Washington. National commitments need to become state policies and landscape-scale conservation efforts, with governments and stakeholders using their existing authorities to contribute to interconnected ecological systems.
There is already a foundation to build upon. During the Biden administration, states across the country advanced conservation commitments through executive orders, legislation, and other policy initiatives. My own state, New Mexico, adopted a 50×50 framework in 2021, establishing a goal of conserving at least 30 percent of its lands by 2030, with an additional 20 percent designated as climate-stabilization areas. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham's Executive Order 2021-052 also established interagency coordination, science-based implementation, and public reporting.
New Mexico's incoming governor, Deb Haaland, will make history as the nation's first Native American governor. A former U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Haaland has an opportunity to revive and build upon Governor Lujan Grisham's 2021 conservation vision by establishing landscape conservation design as the process for advancing 50×50 across the state. That would bring Tribal Nations, public agencies, landowners, and other stakeholders into an integrated decision-making process to identify a preferred landscape configuration and establish shared implementation direction.
These existing commitments need renewed attention. Their implementation should be assessed, strengthened where necessary, and connected to a broader national 50×50 conservation effort.
The conservation community's immediate opportunity is to bring 50×50 into the national policy conversation and establish the scientific and practical case for landscape conservation design as a means of pursuing it.
COP17 has shown that global conservation commitments are falling short. The election has changed the political circumstances in which American conservation policy will be debated.
Science has established the need. International policy has provided direction. Landscape conservation design offers an approach for organizing implementation.
Now advocacy must connect those pieces to national action.
#COP17 #Kuming-Montreal #Congress #landscapeconservation #50×50 #30×30 #DebHaaland
