Finland could need 500 years to meet nature protection goal

Finland is adding protected land too slowly to meet its international nature protection commitments, and could take 500 years to reach its target at the current pace, according to Yle.

The country has protected about 16 to 17 percent of its land, while the agreed target is to protect 30 percent of land and marine environments by 2030. Finland would need to add nearly five million hectares to its protected areas to reach the target. It currently establishes about 10,000 hectares of protected areas each year.

“At the current rate, it will take 500 years for Finland to reach the internationally agreed target,” said Janne Kotiaho, chair of the Finnish Nature Panel and a professor of ecology at the University of Jyväskylä. He attributed the slow progress mainly to insufficient funding for the Metso and Helmi conservation programmes.

World leaders and officials are meeting at an international nature conference in Yerevan, Armenia, to discuss conservation, its funding and other measures to protect nature. The meeting is the first progress review of the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity agreement, reached four years ago.

The agreement sets a goal of protecting 30 percent of land and marine environments by 2030. A report prepared for the conference says protected areas grew by just over two percentage points worldwide between 2020 and 2025, a rate it describes as insufficient. About 19.5 percent of land and inland waters are currently protected, according to the report, while an international protected-area database puts the figure at 18.4 percent. If countries carried out all their pledges, the protected share would rise to 27 percent.

The report says 86 percent of countries have set national targets aligned with the global goals. Finland has also set targets, but still lacks a national biodiversity strategy and has attended the conference for the third time without the required national plan.

Kotiaho praised Finland for starting ecological compensation and natural value markets, which can help restore damaged nature and bring private funding into conservation. In these voluntary systems, landowners can create, sell and set prices for biodiversity and ecosystem services, including to companies and municipalities.

The report says the greatest challenge is changing economic, financial and consumption systems. Funding for biodiversity measures has increased since the agreement was reached, but remains inadequate. Harmful subsidies for nature exceed conservation funding, and current spending on biodiversity is about 0.1 percent of global gross domestic product. Conservation organisations at the conference have called for that share to rise to 1 percent.