Inside the conference centers of this ancient capital, officials from nearly 200 governments, United Nations bureaucrats, environmental NGOs, and selected “stakeholders” are meeting to lock up 30 percent of the world’s land and water — as a starting point. That, they say, is merely a downpayment on eventually putting half of the surface of the globe under international influence and control.
The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) official theme is “taking action for nature.” But the real agenda goes far beyond protecting nature. The true goal: furthering the expansion of international influence over land, water, and even genetic resources, with national governments and private owners expected to comply.
Nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface is the immediate target of the assembled forces here in the Armenian capital. But sweeping additional measures have already been sketched out for what comes next: UN-backed “biodiversity” schemes embedded across every policy area. The implications for private property, economic freedom, and national sovereignty are hard to overstate.
Target 3 and the 30×30 Framework
The gathering’s centerpiece is the first formal global review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in 2022. That agreement contains 23 targets for 2030, each of which is ostensibly aimed at protecting nature from the supposed perils of human activity, liberty, and self-government.
Target 3 is the most far-reaching: It calls for at least 30 percent of the world’s terrestrial, inland water, and marine areas to be “effectively conserved and managed” through the creation of government-controlled “protected areas” and other measures. Advocates label the goal 30×30. Critics, including American agricultural officials who have examined parallel domestic efforts under the Biden administration, have described it as a vehicle for locking up productive land and restricting the people who own and work it.
The biodiversity framework is embedded in the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which former UN officials have described as the “masterplan for humanity” and the “declaration of interdependence.” Biodiversity targets are designed to mesh with climate goals, land-use planning, subsidy reform, and financing rules.
What the UN calls “National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans” serve as the delivery mechanism for injecting the UN-backed policies into every jurisdiction. Governments — including authoritarian regimes and kleptocracies — are expected to revise them, report progress, and face a “stocktake” that identifies who is lagging.
Full Integration of Biodiversity
Even governments that never ratified the CBD, the United States among them, face soft pressure through subnational governments, financial institutions, corporate standards, lobbying by taxpayer-funded “Non-Governmental Organizations,” and the cumulative weight of coordinated international policymaking. Resisting gradually becomes more and more difficult.
Target 1 reinforces the approach by calling for “participatory spatial planning across all areas” to reduce biodiversity loss. In practice, that language has repeatedly been used to justify burdensome controls limiting what private landowners may do with their own property. Such schemes are being implemented worldwide.
Target 14 goes further. It directs governments to ensure the “full integration of biodiversity and its multiple values into policies, regulations, planning and development processes.” It also requires that public and private financial flows — mostly costs born by taxpayers and consumers — be aligned with the UN framework’s goals.
The agenda is not limited to parks or endangered species. It contemplates the insertion of UN-aligned environmental priorities into virtually every aspect of government policy, economic development, and financial decision-making — from farming and housing to infrastructure and investment. Direct UN enforcement is unnecessary when national regulators, banks, and corporations can carry out the program for the globalist organizations.
Hostility to Private Property
Earlier UN documents were more explicit. The Vancouver Declaration, adopted at the 1976 UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I), stated that “Land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset controlled by individuals” and that “Private land ownership is … a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable.”
That view stands in contrast to traditional American legal understandings of property. As recently as 2000, the Washington Supreme Court, citing longstanding principles, defined property as follows:
Property in a thing consists not merely in its ownership and possession but in the unrestricted right of use, enjoyment and disposal. Anything which destroys any of these elements of property, to that extent destroys property itself. The substantial value of property lies in its use. If the right of use be denied, the value of the property is annihilated, and ownership is rendered a barren right.
Obviously, the UN (and Marxist) view of private land ownership is incompatible with genuine private property rights and a free society. Considering the fact that food, clothing, energy, materials, water, and more come from the land, there is extreme danger in handing over control of that land and its resources to governments and international organizations — especially those with demonstrated hostility to liberty and prosperity.
In any case, more government control over economies and resources is strongly correlated with more environmental damage. The inverse is also true: Societies with the freest economies and strongest protections for private property tend to have the cleanest environments.
Contemporary biodiversity language is more polished than the Vancouver Declaration. But the operational effect — expanded government control and international influence over land use — remains consistent to this day. The goals are still the same, even if they are not trumpeted quite as clearly.
American ranchers and farmers who opposed the Biden-era 30×30 executive order understood the stakes, as the resulting national outcry demonstrated. Formal rescission of that order has not eliminated the international template or the domestic constituencies still advancing related measures through state policies, corporate ESG commitments, and federal agency guidance.
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