The vanishing act: how one-third of conservation projects quietly fail after their splashy launches

While COP30 generated headlines with bold new environmental commitments, groundbreaking research reveals a troubling reality behind the fanfare: conservation projects are failing at an alarming rate, often vanishing quietly after their high-profile announcements.

A new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by researchers at the University of Sydney’s Thriving Oceans Research Hub exposes the scope of this crisis. After examining nine major community-based conservation programs across Africa, the team discovered that roughly one-third of participating groups simply stopped fulfilling their conservation duties when implementation became too challenging. Lead researcher Matthew Clark warns this figure likely represents just the tip of the iceberg, as many failed projects go undocumented globally.

The problem extends far beyond individual project failures. Between 1892 and 2018, governments worldwide systematically weakened legal protections for conservation areas through 3,749 documented rollbacks—a process known as Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing and Degazettement (PADDD). These actions stripped protections from approximately 2 million square kilometers across 73 countries, an area equivalent to the entire landmass of Greenland. Nearly two-thirds of these rollbacks directly enabled industrial resource extraction, including mining, oil exploration, and major infrastructure development.

Perhaps most concerning is how these abandoned efforts continue to exist “on paper” as active conservation initiatives, creating a false impression of environmental progress. This gap between announced commitments and actual implementation raises critical questions about how the international community measures and reports conservation success, potentially undermining genuine efforts to protect biodiversity during our current environmental crisis.