Conservation abandonment is a policy blind spot

This year marks the halfway point for multiple global environmental goals, including plans to nearly double the extent of area-based conservation to 30% of the world’s surface by 2030 (1). To date, this coordinated international effort has been inadequate to halt global biodiversity loss. A major but unaccounted-for cause of the shortfall between policy ambitions and real-world outcomes is the abandonment of conservation initiatives, including both informal abdication of resource management responsibilities and formal reversal of governing rules and boundaries (Fig. 1). The US$200 billion annually committed to conservation is spent on a wide diversity of conservation measures, increasingly beyond traditional national parks and other protected areas (PAs), including community-based conservation, eco-certification, and payments for ecosystem services (2). The scant monitoring of conservation abandonment, derived almost entirely from PAs, demonstrates widespread informal abandonment of management responsibilities (i.e., “paper parks” (e.g., 3, 4)) and formal abandonment through protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) (e.g., 5, 6).