Defra published the much anticipated 30by30 Delivery Plan this morning (13 July 2026). The plan outlines how the UK will meet the international 30by30 target that almost 200 countries have signed up to - committing to protect 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. 

The National Landscapes Association’s Head of Policy, Bruce Winney, has looked at the delivery plan and how National Landscapes teams' contributions to the target can be supercharged. 

After much expectation, Defra has launched the long anticipated 30by30 delivery plan.

The Defra team have spent a lot of time over the last few years putting together the criteria for sites to contribute to 30by30 and testing a reporting process, in discussion with many people. This is important but, with time running out, a delivery plan with a vision of how we might get there is crucial.

Overall, the plan is high-level. Given the constraint that it won’t be Defra doing the actual work on the ground, if the promised elements become reality, then there is the opportunity for real progress.

From a National Landscapes point of view, there are some good things and it is worth picking a few out, starting with the obvious intention that protected landscapes (in this case National Landscapes and National Parks) are meant to be at the heart of 30by30.

The next thing is that it is a ‘pipeline’ approach, with three tiers (bronze, silver and gold). Gold is for those sites that meet the criteria and silver is for sites that need some work to get there. The silver sites are the true pipeline part of the plan.

I’m in two minds about the bronze category. Defra acknowledge that most of these sites are unlikely to progress to silver but provide an important service, connecting the areas that do meet the criteria and supporting nature to thrive. So, perhaps it shouldn’t be called bronze and needs a specific status in its own right. What about calling it a Nature Recovery Network?

Since I am a numbers person let’s move on to them.

Defra have done a lot of mapping and as a proportion of England:

• 10.5% is Gold  - based on Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), National Nature Reserves, plus a potential 3.5% from Landscape Recovery projects and eNGO reserves.
• 9% is Silver - basically priority habitat outside SSSIs. This is low hanging fruit as “all” that is needed is to bring it into long term management.
• 12.5% potential - based on Natural England’s habitat network of potential areas of habitat restoration and creation.

This makes a total of 32%, which sounds hopeful: a good start but not the whole story. Not all opportunities within the 32%. will become 30by30 sites.

If there is a 60% success rate of converting opportunities into real work, which is realistic, then of the last two categories, around 13% is likely to count towards 30by30 sometime in the future. So, a further 6.5% will need to be found, a significant proportion of it through land use change. This is in line with the rate of land use change identified in the recent Land Use Framework. Ambitious but possible and at least we now have a good idea of what we need to do.

It’s positive that we are getting towards a joined-up plan: protected landscapes (National Landscapes, National Parks and National Trails), along with SSSIs are seen as the backbone, whilst Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRSs) identify opportunities and the Government Estate Nature Plan is leading by example.

Now we come to the meat of the plan – how are we going to actually deliver 30by30? Defra propose a three stranded approach:

• Make it easier to report sites
• Sort the incentives out
• Get everyone on board

I’ll focus on the second of these.

Public money will have an extremely important role to play. With the increase in capital funding being directed to protected landscapes, there is a need for the right Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes to continue the long-term maintenance of newly created and restored habitat. Indeed, ELMs will be crucial to getting much of the land in the silver category under management. ELM is by far and away the most important source of funding immediately available (something like £7bn available over the next three years), although there are other significant sources such as the Climate for Nature Fund and the Water Industry National Environment Programme.

However, this is probably only 15-20% of what will be needed to deliver 30by30 across England and so there is a further push to draw in private finance, which is still far from a ready and reliable source of funding for nature. The suggestion that government might use greater use guarantees, first loss capital and procurement or tax levers to de-risk early private investment is intriguing. But businesses still want regulation and a sense that the government is committing to the long term.

So, the numbers suggest it is possible, we know how much it will cost (at least in the protected landscapes) and money is beginning to flow.

What we then need is for 30by30, and especially ELM, to be central in Defra’s strategy. The plan reads as if there was input from a lot of different parts of Defra. If this is truly the case and 30by30 is well embedded throughout Defra and across other departments through the Land Use Framework and the Government Estate, it has the potential to break the silos and get funding flowing to the right places. ELM is key here as we need it in order to maintain and manage habitats in the long term. Without that, the capital being spent now will be wasted.

National Landscapes are already stepping up to play their part and are ready to scale up and do more. Sufficient, flexible funding, preferably committed over five-year periods, would allow us to deliver our ambitious management plans. And government backing the duty for relevant authorities to ‘further the purposes of protected landscapes’ from the Levelling Up and regeneration Act (2023) would really help us to work with partners to scale up what we are already doing and to rise to the challenge of getting to that crucial 30by30 milestone.