30×30 Cannot Be Just a Protected-Area Boundary: Indonesia’s People’s Conservation Summit Puts the Question of Who Decides Conservation Before COP17

# 30×30 Cannot Be Just a Protected-Area Boundary: Indonesia’s People’s Conservation Summit Puts the Question of Who Decides Conservation Before COP17

By Two-Way Knowledge Lab; Advisory Consultant: the late Elder 余金正 | Bunun | 丹社馬遠村 | Senior cultural elder; long engaged with traditional healing culture, ancestral migration, community norms, and taboos

Global biodiversity governance is entering a phase in which political and cultural questions can easily disappear behind a headline number. Target 3 of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for at least 30 percent of terrestrial and inland-water areas, and 30 percent of coastal and marine areas, to be effectively conserved and managed by 2030. The shorthand “30×30” can sound like a geometry exercise: draw boundaries, count hectares, calculate percentages, and publish a map. Yet the harder questions sit beneath the number. Who decides what is included? Who defines “effective management”? Are the people who have lived with, harvested from, fished, grazed, hunted, cared for, or maintained responsibilities toward these places recognized as governors and partners, or merely as subjects of management?

The Peoples’ Conservation Summit 2026, held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, from 1 to 3 September, brought that question directly into the period leading to CBD COP17. Official summit material describes the meeting as a platform for people’s conservation practitioners, communities, researchers, government actors and other stakeholders, with its outputs intended to feed into the COP17 process. One timing point matters. The summit ended on 3 September, but that does not mean the People’s Conservation Declaration was formally finalized that day. The official timeline places the declaration and the Local Biodiversity Outlook Indonesia in a post-summit finalization phase extending toward the COP17 timetable in October. What can be said today is therefore precise: consultation at the summit has concluded, while the texts and policy positions are still moving toward their final form.

That interval is not a bureaucratic footnote. International meetings are often compressed into a news sequence of meeting, announcement and conclusion. In practice, institutional consequences often depend on the wording fixed after the meeting: which concepts enter the final declaration, which rights are made explicit, and which claims remain advocacy rather than adopted text. For Indigenous peoples and local communities, those distinctions can shape how land, resources and knowledge are later recognized in national conservation systems.

The official wording of CBD Target 3 is considerably richer than the number 30. It calls for ecologically representative, well-connected and equitably governed systems, recognizes Indigenous and traditional territories where applicable, and requires respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities over their traditional territories. CBD guidance further links decisions affecting such territories to the recognition of rights and to free, prior and informed consent. A state could therefore increase protected-area coverage while weakening community decision-making, use rights or knowledge governance. It might improve the percentage on a map and still fall short of the target’s requirement for equitable governance.

This is where a Two-Eyed Seeing, or two-way knowledge, approach becomes substantive rather than decorative. Satellite remote sensing, species surveys, habitat models and GIS can reveal changes in forest cover, identify biodiversity concentrations and test landscape connectivity. They are indispensable. But a forest is not only a polygon to the people who live with it. It may also contain seasonal rules for harvesting, areas that should not be entered, responsibilities attached to families or groups, restrictions associated with particular species, judgments about recovery after disturbance, and social rules governing when use should begin or stop. If these relations are reduced to coordinates and deposited in a centralized database, the system may preserve location while stripping away the equally important questions of who can interpret the information and who has authority to decide whether it should be disclosed.

Conservation data sovereignty should therefore not be treated as an optional ethics add-on. When governments or researchers request information about sacred places, hunting routes, medicinal plants, water sources or rare species, the data can alter land value, tourism pressure, enforcement practices and even the risk of illegal collection. Responsible conservation governance does not require digitizing everything. It requires rules about what can be public, what should remain restricted, who can authorize secondary use, and how a community can correct data that are wrong, outdated or detached from their context.

After COP16, the Convention also strengthened the institutional position of Article 8(j) and related provisions. Parties adopted a new programme of work and agreed to establish a permanent subsidiary body on Article 8(j), intended to strengthen the meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities throughout Convention processes. The broader significance is that traditional knowledge is increasingly being embedded in the procedures of biodiversity governance rather than left as a cultural appendix. Future evaluation of 30×30 will therefore be incomplete if it counts new protected areas without examining rights, governance and participation.

For Taiwan and for other island, mountain and coastal societies, the lesson is not to copy Indonesia’s institutions. It is to change the sequence of questions. Before drawing a conservation boundary, ask who has cared for the area over time and what governance rules already exist. Ask where scientific monitoring and local observation corroborate one another and where they remain non-equivalent. If a GIS or biodiversity database is needed, ask whether access can be tiered, whether communities can restrict particular uses, and who is responsible for remedy when conservation measures disrupt livelihoods, movement routes or cultural practice.

This approach is neither anti-science nor a romanticization of local knowledge. Local knowledge can vary internally by generation, gender, livelihood and residence. Scientific models also have limits of resolution, sampling and uncertainty. Two-way knowledge does not claim that one knowledge system is always superior. Its purpose is to create an institutional setting in which differences remain visible, evidence can be questioned, and authority and responsibility are explicit.

Thirty-by-thirty is easy to visualize as a greener world map. But the factor that determines whether it is fair and effective may not be where the boundary is drawn. It may be what happens after the line appears: who is still able to speak, who can amend the rules, and who remains responsible for the place. The challenge raised by Indonesia’s People’s Conservation Summit before COP17 is therefore to reconnect “how much is conserved” with “who governs, through what knowledge, and with what accountability.” If those questions are separated, 30 percent risks becoming an elegant global indicator. If they are answered together, it can become a genuine reform of biodiversity governance.

Primary sources

• Peoples' Conservation Summit 2026 (official)
• Convention on Biological Diversity — KMGBF Target 3
• Convention on Biological Diversity — Article 8(j)