Championing Conservation as Climate Action

In January, President Biden committed to conserving at least 30 percent of America’s lands, inland waters, and ocean areas by 2030. This goal, also known as “30x30,” is essential to fostering a healthier climate, safeguarding air and water quality, protecting our food supply and health, and preventing mass wildlife extinctions.

NRDC helped secure this promise and is working to ensure that the first-ever national conservation strategy results in meaningful actions to address the intersecting biodiversity and climate crises. The federal strategy also, critically, seeks to remedy the inequitable access to nature that has left people of color more than three times as likely to live in nature-deprived areas. It also highlights the need to engage a wide range of stakeholders in this work, from tribal and Indigenous communities to farmers, ranchers, and outdoors enthusiasts.

Canada’s boreal forest, the world’s largest remaining intact forest, is home to hundreds of Indigenous communities, is a critical refuge for wildlife such as the iconic boreal caribou, and is vital in the fight against climate change. As the most carbon-dense terrestrial ecosystem in the world, it stores twice as much carbon as the world’s oil reserves.

NRDC and our members and activists have continued to pressure the Canadian government to take action and to call out corporations for their destruction of this climate-critical forest. An April analysis by our Canada Program policy advocates found that industrial logging, which clearcuts more than one million acres of Canadian boreal forest every year, is accelerating climate change while undermining the rights of the Indigenous Peoples who have lived there for millennia. And an October report highlighted how carbon-accounting loopholes for the logging industry hinder Canada’s leadership on climate—a cause we elevated ahead of COP26 as part of our push to make countries in the Global North take responsibility for their own unsustainable forest loss. Our activists sent more than 46,000 petitions to pressure Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to address this issue. Additionally, NRDC worked with policymakers in California and New York to advance cutting-edge legislation that would ensure the states’ purchases of forest products do not drive boreal or tropical forest deforestation or degradation or violations of Indigenous rights.

NRDC also highlighted corporate accountability through our third annual Issue with Tissue scorecard. The report shows how America’s largest tissue brands are failing the climate, communities, and biodiversity by creating throwaway products from trees, especially those logged in Canada’s boreal. While many companies are offering more sustainably made toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues, Procter & Gamble (P&G), a target of our boreal advocacy campaign, remains stubbornly stuck in the past, with all of its products receiving an F grade for the third year in a row. But the mounting public pressure is starting to pay off: Last year, at its annual shareholders’ meeting, 67 percent of P&G investors voted in favor of a resolution that calls on the company to stop driving deforestation and forest degradation. 

“Saving our planet from climate collapse requires dismantling the tree-to-toilet pipeline that is flushing away some of our most important natural climate allies,” said Shelley Vinyard, NRDC’s boreal corporate campaign manager. “Now is the time for real leadership from the biggest players.”

For years, NRDC has used every tool in our arsenal to fight for the protections of three national monuments—Bears Ears, Grand Staircase–Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts. One of the most ecologically intact, road-free areas in the Lower 48, Bears Ears is home to countless dwellings, kivas, rock art panels, and other sites cherished by the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, Ute Indian Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. Nearby, Grand Staircase–Escalante features some of the region’s most beloved badlands, cliffs, and canyon systems. Meanwhile, Northeast Canyons and Seamounts is a biodiversity hot spot, teeming with 1,000-year-old corals and offering important habitat for dolphins and whales. Finally, after a long advocacy campaign led by the tribes and supported by NRDC and other environmental allies, President Biden announced in October that he would restore the critical protections denied to these monuments by his predecessor. “This is a victory for science, for future generations, and for anyone who looks to these special places for solace, education, healing, and inspiration,” said NRDC president and CEO Manish Bapna, upon learning the news that the trio will no longer be up for grabs by industry.

In another reversal of former president Trump’s destructive orders, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reinstated its Clean Water Act process to safeguard Alaska’s Bristol Bay from the Pebble Mine and other large-scale mining. The decision is a major step toward permanently protecting the bay, home to the world’s greatest wild salmon ecosystem and the homeland of the Alutiiq, Dena’ina, and Yup'ik peoples. It also recognizes the voices of the Alaska natives who have rallied against the massive Pebble Mine project for decades. “This is a long-haul kind of thing, and that's the mindset that anybody who's been working on this Pebble fight has had to have,” said Melanie Brown, a fourth-generation Yup’ik and Inupiaq commercial fisher. “It's been hard in a lot of ways, but it’s also been a time to really soul-search and develop a better understanding of what is really most important and the kind of world we want to live in.”