The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 concrete and measurable targets have been decided in 2015 and should be reached by 2030. The SDGs can be seen as the presently most important decision the entire world community has taken to secure the future of human society and life on earth. Most people have heard about the need to save the Climate, the Paris Agreement, the outcomes of the recent UN Climate Talks in Glasgow (COP26) or the 1.5 °C target, which are all related to the SDG 13 (“Climate Action”). Of the same highest importance than saving the climate is to reverse the degradation of biological diversity (nature) on earth, the SDGs 14 (“LIFE BELOW WATER”) and 15 (“LIFE ON LAND”).
That there is interdependence among the different SDGs, and that the Biodiversity goals are among the four most crucial SDGs without the other goals could not be reached, a nice animation of the Stockholm Resilience Centre about the hierarchy of SDGs shows:
Linking Tourism & Conservation (LT&C) was established in 2014 as a non-governmental organisation to contribute to reaching the biodiversity goals with support from tourism. Thereby LT&C focuses on completing a global protected area network as the most critical target to safeguard nature/biodiversity.
LT&C is a nature conservation NGO supporting the expected new UN target of creating a global protected area network by 2030, which covers representatively 30% of the different marine and terrestrial ecosystems and habitats on earth (the “30×30 Goal“; see also our partnership with the Campaign for Nature). LT&C works for making the tourism industry a leading actor implementing the 30×30 Goal by
- Identifying and profiling best cases (LT&C-Examples), where tourism is supporting financially, politically or by ways of education the establishment and development of protected areas;
- Mainstreaming LT&C-Examples by promoting and communicating them in (nature interested) traveller circles and by offering educative study tours to LT&C Example destinations (in cooperation tour operators, which are members of LT&C, and who are involved in or are providers of such examples);
- Developing incentives that LT&C Examples are getting replicated, their providers support each other and that the creation of such examples can become an accelerating movement;
- Partnering with conservation as well as tourism-related local, national and international (governmental and non-governmental) organisations, institutions and companies supporting the 30×30 Goal;
- Finding ways that LT&C-Examples become an official status within the UN-Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for reaching the 30×30 Goal;
- Creating a global base of members from both tourism and conservation of all levels of society becoming involved in our mission.
