By 2030, the world stands to lose up to two million species. Not to war or wildfire, but to silence. The slow, steady erasure that comes when conservation lags behind greed, and policy falls short of urgency. In a world scrambling to save what’s left, the Kunming Montreal 30×30 target has emerged like a lifeline: a global promise to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030. But bold targets don’t mean much if they bulldoze over people on the way.

“We can’t ask countries to protect 30% of their lands and seas while ignoring their development needs,” said Kina Murphy, Chief Scientist and Africa Policy Lead for the Campaign for Nature, while facilitating the 31st Tipping Points Webinar hosted by the Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation (OGRC).

Conservationists cannot be seen displacing people to save nature, never again. Not when there are many other alternative ways to conserve biodiversity. That was the resounding message during the webinar.

Drawing from his childhood experience, Simon Pooley, Lambert Lecturer in Environment, highlighted the dark past of conservation initiatives in South Africa. Having grown up in Ndumo Game Reserve, he considers his childhood a blessing.

He calls it “a little pocket of extraordinary biodiversity” nestled in the confluence of the Usutu and the Pungola rivers in northern KwaZulu-Natal. His childhood, as he remembers it, was made up of beautiful yellow fever trees that lined lakes teeming with water birds, fish, harumphing hippopotamuses, and crocodiles basking on the grazing lawns. The Lambombo Mountains stood towering in the distance.

Simon Pooley on the banks of Nyamithi floodplain in Ndumo Game Reserve. Pooley works as an environmental educator, researcher and Lambert lecturer in environment at Birkbeck University of London (Photo: Supplied).

While he had the fortune of growing up in a game park, surrounded by nature’s canvas, he laments that his black South African friends on the other hand, were evicted from this fenced reserve. This was to create a refuge for wildlife deemed incompatible with human life: crocodiles, hippos, and rhinos. “It’s worth recalling, however, that locals had been living alongside the wildlife from the proclamation of the Reserve in 1924, up until 1966,” he pointed out.

These very people who had lived in harmony with these animals were fenced out and then labelled poachers when they returned to hunt for food during times of desperation. The reserve became not just a wildlife sanctuary, but a flashpoint of inequality, exclusion, and conflict.

Indigenous Wisdom, Missing From the Table
Conservation has too often been a story of exclusion. Indigenous communities, despite being long-time stewards of biodiversity, are still rarely at the centre of conservation strategies.

“Conservation should begin with listening,” says Natasha Wilson, Park Expansion Manager-SANParks (Protected Area and Conservation Area expansion). “We need to understand local communities and ensure mechanisms support both biodiversity and the people who depend on it. You can’t separate the two.”

This perspective is gaining ground through models like Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs); a category that recognizes land conserved outside formal protected areas. These could include sacred forests, community-managed fisheries, or culturally protected grazing zones.

After apartheid, the promise of co-management between communities and the provincial conservation authority, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, marked a hopeful turn. However, the promise faltered. Land claims were settled without clarity, political promises of land and development went unmet, and a reserve once protected by law and legacy was breached. Not just by locals seeking land, but by a broken system unable to honour its commitments.

Fence-cutting began in 2008 and has not stopped. Conservation staff, demoralised and under-resourced, have now abandoned swathes of the reserve’s most vital floodplain.

At stake is not just Ndumo’s designation as a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance, but South Africa’s credibility on the global conservation stage. The solution, conservatist agree, lies in involving communities rather than fencing them off.

Stewardship as Resistance
In Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, conservationists have taken that route. Instead of displacing people, they’ve tried to work with them. The Mpumalanga Biodiversity Stewardship Programme uses voluntary agreements to help communities and private landowners conserve ecologically important areas.

“We’ve added over 162,000 hectares through stewardship in the past 15 years,” Morris explains.“But at the current rate, it’ll take us 68 years to reach the 30% target. We’re moving, but not fast enough.”

Obstacles abound. Conflicting land uses like mining and wind farms, lack of incentives for landowners, and a conservation agency stretched thin are just a few of the hurdles. Still, stewardship remains one of the few models rooted in collaboration rather than exclusion.

“People are drawn to stewardship because it protects their land from being taken over by mining,” he says.“It’s not just about wildlife, it’s about dignity, heritage, and control.”

Lake Nyamithi, Ndumo Game Reserve, Maputaland, KwaZulu-Natal. The reserve’s extraordinary biodiversity is under threat. Its eastern region is occupied by communal farmers, fishermen, and cattle herders – and now a battle is on to save 100-year-old reserve from coal and oil shale drilling (Photo: Bernard Dupont).

The process, however, is far from simple. Declaring protected areas is a consultative journey that can take 12 to 24 months and must be driven by landowner consent. That’s a big ask in places where land rights are still recovering from centuries of colonial skew.
“Much of South Africa’s land is still under white commercial ownership,” Brian Morris, Manager for Protected Areas Expansion and Biodiversity Stewardship within the MΤΡΑ, adds. “We’re trying to extend stewardship to community-owned and state land, but that comes with logistical and political complexities.”

For Wilson, the shift is seismic. “I’ll admit,” she says, “SANParks used to work strictly within our fences.” But fences, she’s quick to add, are no longer enough. The future of conservation, as she sees it, lies in breaking down those boundaries, both literally and philosophically. That means expanding beyond park borders, partnering with communal and private landowners, and anchoring biodiversity work in real relationships.

They’re currently declaring a new national park in the grasslands near Maclear, in the Eastern Cape, not by buying out land but by inviting landowners in. Some are emerging farmers, others operate communal lands, but all are choosing to commit their land to conservation. “It’s quite a different stance,” Wilson says. “We’re looking at livestock as part of the ecosystem, not separate from it.”

“We can’t do conservation the way we did before,” she says. What’s needed now is patience, humility, and a willingness to change tact. To listen more. To understand better. To ensure that conservation tools support, not sideline, local and Indigenous communities.

That, she believes, is the only way to truly shift the needle, and avoid repeating the same mistakes of exclusion, erasure, and imbalance that conservation efforts have carried for too long.

What haunts him, Pooley says, is this creeping idea that conservation must always “pay its way.” In places as remote as Ndumo, that argument feels like a trap. “If you start putting a Rand value on what nature offers,” he says, “then conservation will lose every single time, to mining, to sugarcane, to whatever scheme is next.”

“Not everything should have to justify itself in cash. People care about more than money. And maybe that’s something we can still build on.”

Kemunto Ogutu is a Kenyan-based correspondent for Roving Reporters.