Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature’s contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors. We find that conserving approximately half of global land area through protection or sustainable management could provide 90% of the current levels of ten of nature’s contributions to people and meet minimum representation targets for 26,709 terrestrial vertebrate species. This finding supports recent commitments by national governments under the Global Biodiversity Framework to conserve at least 30% of global lands and waters, and proposals to conserve half of the Earth. More than one-third of areas required for conserving nature’s contributions to people and species are also highly suitable for agriculture, renewable energy, oil and gas, mining, or urban expansion. This indicates potential conflicts among conservation, climate and development goals.

In an attempt to prevent further losses of biodiversity and NCP, nearly 200 nations have recently committed to effectively conserving and managing 30% of lands and waters by 2030 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework3 and similar national targets (e.g., “America the Beautiful”4). Other proposals call for conserving 50% of global land area, or “Half-Earth”, to safeguard biodiversity and avert the most devastating effects of climate change5,6. National governments have also initiated efforts to achieve targets related to the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. There is a growing recognition that biodiversity, climate, and development goals are intertwined: addressing climate change is necessary to avoid further losses of biodiversity1, nature-based solutions are essential for mitigating and adapting to climate change7, and conserving natural assets and addressing climate are both foundational for achieving sustainable development8. At the same time, ensuring food, energy, and livelihood security would require carefully planned development of agriculture, energy, urban expansion, and other sectors9. Unfortunately, this kind of coordinated planning is rare; where development is not designed to optimize NCP and biodiversity, conservation and development goals will conflict.