7% and counting - DEFRAs plan to deliver 30 by 30

On 13 July 2026, Defra published its 30by30 on land: Delivery Plan, the Government's blueprint for effectively conserving and managing 30% of England's land for nature by the end of the decade, as part of its commitment under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The difficulty, as the plan itself concedes, lies in the arithmetic, because only around 7%t of England currently meets the standard and just four years remain in which to close the gap.

The plan answers this with a tiered system of Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Gold is land that fully meets the criteria and counts towards the official figure, Silver is a pipeline of land that could reach the standard with better protection or management, and Bronze is everything else that still does something useful for nature, from a garden to an arable field margin. Landowners are invited to assess their own holdings against four straightforward questions and, if they pass, to enter the pipeline. Set against that, the plan offers an encouraging figure, namely that some 32 per cent of England either already counts or has the potential to, with a further portion identified as suitable for new habitat creation.

The intent becomes clearer when the plan is read alongside its companion document, England's first Land Use Framework, which was published in March. The Framework provides the strategic map of where competing demands for housing, food, energy, and nature might best be met, and 30by30 is the nature objective delivered through that spatial logic. Both draw on the same evidence base, and a newly created Land Use Unit has been given the task of joining the data together. We looked at the Framework's implications for climate-resilient planting when it appeared, and the same principle holds here, in that strategy sets the direction whilst delivery is where landscapes are won or lost. The plan has met with sharp criticism. The RSPB called it hugely disappointing and completely insufficient, pointing to the absence of any timeline for creating new Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and to a heavy reliance on the voluntary actions of private landowners with few new legal protections to underpin them. These are fair concerns. A target that rests on a twenty-year intention to conserve, rather than on durable protection, carries a real risk that today’s Silver land will quietly slip back to Bronze, and a plan that is well supplied with toolkits and online portals is not yet a plan with milestones.

We have made a version of this argument before. When the Government announced its £30 million Wildlife-Rich Habitat Fund, we welcomed it as a real step forward while noting that it was the beginning of the journey rather than its conclusion. The same holds true now. Acknowledging the shortcomings is not a counsel of despair. It is the honest starting point for a more useful question, which is how the country might actually get close to the target.

The most important figure in the plan is not the 7% that counts today but the twenty-five points or so that could count with the right work, and that is where the target will be met or missed. It turns almost entirely on the quality of design, establishment, and long-term management. Land does not become Gold because a document says so; it earns that standing only when the habitat is thriving and resilient enough to stay that way. This is exacting, science-led work, work that Kew Reach is helping landowners undertake in big and small ways. Moving a parcel of land from Silver to Gold means understanding what a site can support, choosing species suited not to the climate of today but to the hotter, drier future that our landscapes face, and building in the monitoring that shows habitat has not only been created but sustained. It means designing for function as much as for appearance, with planting that closes the widening gap between pollinators and the plants they depend on, that supports the soil biodiversity beneath our feet, and that helps to cool our warming towns and cities, where every square metre counts.

It is worth remembering, too, that the target will not be met on protected land alone. The plan is explicit that Bronze land, meaning the gardens, verges, field margins, and unprotected ground that make up much of England, matters a great deal for connectivity, and that development itself must now contribute, with Biodiversity Net Gain extending to major infrastructure later this year. Nature gain has to be delivered everywhere, at every scale, and it has to be made to last.

This is the work to which we are dedicated. Drawing on the scientific expertise of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, we help landowners, developers, investors, and public bodies to turn the 30by30 ambition into habitat that will still flourish in twenty, thirty, and forty years' time. Our work runs the length of that journey, beginning with baseline ecological assessment that establishes what a piece of land could become, moving through evidence-led and climate-resilient species selection that matches a site's future conditions, extending to planting design tuned for pollinators, soil health, and ecosystem-service function, and continuing into the long-term monitoring that gives confidence the outcomes are real. Whether you look after a National Park or a single field, a protected landscape or an urban development plot, we can help you find the path from where your land is now to where 30by30 needs it to be.

If you own or manage land, whether large or small, protected or unprotected, and you would like to understand its potential to contribute to 30by30, we would be glad to talk. You can book an introductory call with our team to discuss your project or your land, and where nature gain might begin.