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This is good news for the whole world’s climate, as billions of tonnes of carbon are preserved in forests and soils rather than being released into the atmosphere. But protecting the Amazon rain forest is also a win–win strategy locally, as large areas of healthy forest are necessary to maintain the wet climate that the rain forest needs to survive overall. Brazil shows that strong government policies can make a real difference: In 2000 less than a tenth of Amazonia was protected, whereas since then conservation areas on both federal and state lands have increased fivefold to more than 1.25 million square kilometers, covering nearly a quarter of the land area of the forest.

An important part of this strategy is that the government is working with indigenous people who live in the Amazon region: Studies have shown that once granted land rights, local tribes have successfully protected huge areas against deforestation, yielding enormous benefits for biodiversity and the climate.19 According to one computer-modeling study, state parks and indigenous lands—which together add up to 2.3 million square kilometers, or 43 percent of Amazonia—may already be sufficient to buffer against a climatic tipping point that would dry out the forest.20 This is no argument for complacency, however: In the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso, the state legislature recently passed a bill that would strip away much of the rain forest protection and increase the area zoned for cattle ranching and soybean plantations.21

At a global level, it matters a great deal which bits of land are plowed up and which are protected. The 17 percent of land identified as a target by the Nagoya agreements to be conserved must be zoned in line with the biodiversity “hot spots” that harbor the vast majority of the world’s threatened species. An incredible 44 percent of plants and 35 percent of animals are confined to 25 hot spots covering only 1.4 percent of the land surface of the Earth.22 This is an enormous opportunity: We can conserve nearly half the world’s biodiversity by protecting just over 1 percent of the total land area—a fantastic bargain by any assessment. One of the problems of today’s parks and reserves is that they do not necessarily correlate with areas of high biodiversity or unique and threatened species: Indeed, many areas of high conservation value are not protected at all—their defenseless inhabitants are consequently known as “gap species.”23

The Nagoya targets represent a bare minimum, however. We must also seek to protect as much as possible of the world’s last true great wildernesses, from the North American deserts to the mountainous forests of New Guinea, not just for their biodiversity value but also because these are the places that most closely approximate the natural state of the planet’s biomes and are thus likely to be essential components of the Earth system. The knowledge that true wilderness remains and will continue to do so also has great cultural and psychological importance for people, even city-dwellers who rarely if ever visit wild areas. How many of us ever see the Arctic tundra? Yet I am sure an overwhelming majority of us gain a benefit from knowing it is there. One recent study concluded that 44 percent of the Earth’s surface remains relatively wild, particularly the Northern Hemisphere boreal forests, Arctic tundra areas in Siberia and Canada, the great deserts in North Africa, Central Asia, and Australia, and the tropical forest belt. These areas remain 70 percent intact even today and are sparsely populated with just 1.1 people or less per square kilometer (excluding urban settlements).24

However, just 7 percent of this area is currently protected. A second urgent priority for the international community is to recognize the global value of wilderness, and to devise protection strategies that compensate the 80 million or so rural inhabitants living in these areas for the opportunities forgone by the need to curb disturbances like grazing, logging, and mining. Given