26.8% of Earth’s land is already in some kind of conservation area, a Nature study finds

About 26.8% of Earth’s land sits inside some form of conservation area, well above the 18.5% that official statistics report as conserved. The estimate arrived on Wednesday, October 14, in a paper in the journal Nature, which combined global protected-area records with national datasets that many countries never fed into international tallies. A gap of roughly eight percentage points changes the arithmetic on a worldwide goal that had looked badly behind schedule.

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Helen O’Neill, a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Zoology in London, led the work. Her reading of the larger number is restrained: “With four years to go, the terrestrial component of the 30% target seems out of reach.”

Nature paper’s 26.81% estimate against the official 18.5%

The study, titled “Global conservation area coverage substantially exceeds current estimates,” starts from a simple observation: the official global figure counts only areas that countries have formally reported and that meet international recognition criteria. Plenty of land is managed for wildlife in other ways, from community reserves to private conservancies, and never appears in the global database. The researchers built a representative sample covering 10% of the world’s land across 25 countries and territories, merged national datasets with global ones, and extrapolated the result to the whole terrestrial realm.

The central estimate lands at 26.81% for 2022. Within that, globally recognized protected areas account for 15.79%, nationally recognized protected areas add 3.64%, and possible other effective area-based conservation measures contribute 7.38%. The official 18.5% figure, reported in the institutional release accompanying the paper, therefore leaves out a large band of land that is demonstrably set aside, even if it is not counted.

The paper carries the identifier DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-11157-4, and the official baseline it challenges is the kind of record that the Protected Planet database compiles from national submissions. Land that never reaches such a submission, however well it is managed for wildlife, stays invisible in global statistics, which is the central point of the analysis and the reason the gap exists at all.

The authors are open about the method’s limits. The 26.81% number is an extrapolation from a sample rather than a census, with a reported standard deviation of 0.239 percentage points, and the authors adjusted it to match official protected-area coverage. Much of the underlying national data is not public, and results are reported only at the global level.

The 30% target under the Kunming-Montreal framework

Governments committed to protect at least 30% of land and sea by 2030 under Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls for effective conservation and management of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas. On official numbers, the terrestrial component was 11.5 percentage points short, equal to about 15.5 million square kilometers of land. With the new estimate, the remaining gap shrinks to about 3.2 percentage points.

That shift does not mean the finish line is near on paper. Bob Smith, who directs the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent and is the study’s lead investigator, argued that countries need to put much more effort into officially recognising the conservation areas that already exist. Land that is conserved in practice but invisible in the record cannot count toward the target, and cannot be defended in planning disputes either.

Heather Bingham, who leads the Protected Planet Initiative at the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge and is a co-author, offered the most pointed caution. In her words, “conserving 30% of lands and seas is not sufficient on its own.” Area is a blunt measure, she said, and the places set aside must also be effectively managed, well connected, diverse and fair to local people.

Grasslands, shrublands and who gets left unprotected

Where the extra land sits matters as much as how much of it exists. The abstract reports that the additional conservation area does little to close gaps in ecological representativeness. A protection-equality score, running from zero to one with one meaning perfectly even coverage, rises only from 0.405 for globally recognized protected areas to 0.505 once every conservation type is counted. Habitats such as grasslands and shrublands keep limited protection, which means the added acreage skews toward ecosystems that were already relatively well covered.

The ecoregion counts show the same pattern. Under globally recognized protected areas alone, 80 of a median 173 ecoregions have less than 10% coverage, a number that falls to 51 when all conservation types are included. Ecoregions with at least 30% coverage rise from 43 to 80. Progress is real but uneven, and dozens of ecological regions remain thinly covered either way. A country could hit a percentage target by recognising large tracts of already-protected, sparsely used land while leaving threatened grassland corridors untouched, which is why the authors call for more strategic and inclusive planning to fill the representation gaps rather than chasing area alone.

The research was funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Natural Environment Research Council, and the authors declare no competing interests. Smith framed the practical consequence as a two-part job: improving the effectiveness of every conservation area matters as much as expanding the total, and recognising the land already doing conservation work is the quickest route to a truthful count. For the 2030 goal, the data now say the world is closer than the official ledger shows, but still short of a coherent, well-managed network.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.