Subscribe
African Protected and Conserved Areas (PCAs) received the highest financial support for biodiversity conservation under the 30x30 international funding initiative, according to a new report released at the seventh session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-7) on December 10, 2025.
The African PCAs received nearly half off all tracked international PCA funding (47 per cent of all inflows) and emerged as the fastest growing recipients globally between 2014 and 2024.
This amount was in sharp contrast to just four per cent funding that went to Small Island Developing States (SIDSs), and other oceanic regions. These areas received about $42 million annually in international 30x30 funding over the period, despite being explicitly prioritised in the under target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
Despite surprisingly attracting the highest funding, the amount was still far short of what is needed by African PCAs and is inadequate to fund both conservation of existing PCAs or to establish new ones, according to Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature organisation.
“More money has gone to Africa this time, but it is not enough. It is easy to question why donors have responded well for the continent. But Africa has some of the best PCAs in the world, that hold some very important biodiversity including some very iconic wildlife species,” O’Donnell told Down To Earth.
He was emphatic that even though the continent had fared better compared to other regions of the world, it was still “dramatically underfunded”. A number of African governments had performed relatively well in protecting their PCAs, observed O’Donnell.
Overall, the report titled State of International 30x30 Funding found that support for PCAs in developing countries grew from $370 million in 2014 to over $1 billion in 2024.
In the two years following the GBF, average annual funding climbed 68 per cent compared to the previous four-year period, with money that came from the philanthropic sector increasing by 87 per cent.
Most international funding (80 per cent) is going towards strengthening existing protected areas, and relatively little is going towards the expansion of protected areas, according to the analysis.
Also, much of the funding goes to conventional protected areas versus those, for example, under the stewardship of indigenous peoples or other local communities, it further established.
Most international PCA funding targets terrestrial ecosystems, with marine PCAs accounting for about 14 per cent of total flows. “Marine protection remains substantially behind terrestrial protection in both coverage and effectiveness, as of 2024, only about 17.6 per cent of land and inland waters and 8.4 per cent of the ocean are within documented protected and conserved areas, and just 2.8 per cent of the global ocean is estimated to be effectively protected,” it added.
However, to meet the GBF’s Target 19 as set out by the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework which aims to raise $200 billion annually for biodiversity from various sources, including $30 billion through international finance, no less than $6 billion per year needs to be mobilised by 2030.
“At the current growth rate, the world will miss that target by US$4 billion annually. Closing that gap would require accelerating to a 34 per cent growth rate,” the report explained.
Five donors or multilateral mechanisms provided 56 per cent of all tracked PCA disbursements for 30x30. These included Germany, the World Bank, Global Environment Facility (GEF), the European Union, and the United States. “This small donor pool makes funding vulnerable to political shifts and changing priorities among key actors,” stated the assessment by Indufor, Campaign for Nature, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and Rainforest Foundation Norway.
However, according to O’Donnell, this has since changed with funding that previously came from the US via the assistance from USAID having dried up for most of 2025.
A reduction was also expected from the United Kingdom and France; the former having indicated that it was planning cuts for international aid.
“With the UK set to reduce international spending, funding for biodiversity is likely to either decrease or go flat, and those categories that are hugely underfunded including marine and ocean biodiversity are likely to see even less funding,” he noted.
“We hope that governments will have a relook at their budgets and consider re-allocation of money from things such as subsidies for sectors such as extractive, fossils and industrial fishing, in order to raise enough money for biodiversity,” the director said.
Another way of improving fundraising for biodiversity would be taxing or incentivising the sectors to donate more for conservation, while diversifying donors to include wealthy countries in the Middle East and Asia, such as Saudi Arabia and Singapore, he added.
Consequences for falling funding for biodiversity conservation may include loss of species, exposure to extreme weather events, and general loss of biodiversity services.
The global biodiversity target of protecting and conserving at least 30 per cent of the world’s land and ocean by 2030 (30x30), justifies international fundraising on the basis of the fact that many of the world’s “unprotected, most biodiverse areas are located in countries with constrained public budgets and competing development needs”.
International finance, it contends, will be pivotal to delivering 30x30 fairly and effectively, the funds being needed to pay for activities, including legally establishing new protected areas, providing capacity to rangers who protect existing protected and conserved areas, and supporting indigenous groups and local communities.