The Nature Conservancy Seeks Director, 30x30 Biodiversity Initiative
The Director, 30x30 Biodiversity Initiative provides the strategic direction, coordination, and fosters collaboration across the organization to advance the Conservancy’s efforts to protect a representative and inclusive 30% of Lands, Freshwater and Oceans by 2030 in line with global and national commitments. This role collaborates closely with global, regional, and local teams to advance interconnected work streams and helps to set a clear vision, work plans, budget support, and overall management and coordination for the Initiative. They are a key representative for this body of work with partners and will support fundraising across the initiative.
This position sits within The Nature Conservancy’s Global Protect Oceans, Lands, and Waters team. The Director is responsible for collaborating with a large and distributed team to ensure core principles for successful 30x30 implementation are effectively integrated and implemented, including using a broad definition of protection categories and strategies, protecting representative and resilience ecosystems, ensuring those are effectively managed and durable (including policies, funding, and support from stakeholders), and that 30x30 targets and implementation are collaborative and incorporate equity considerations.
The Director coordinates across five key work streams to unlock the full potential of global 30x30 commitments to conserve the lands, freshwater, and marine systems critical for biodiversity, climate, and people:
1. Resource Mobilization – unlocking funding to implement global and national 30x30 commitments
2. Policy – supporting global and national level policies to ensure clear targets, monitoring, and support systems in place to achieve these ambitious goals
3. Science, Planning, and Tools – providing foundation science support, tools, and planning efforts at global, national, and local scales to help guide implementation of 30x30 commitments
4. Communications campaigns – building momentum and support for 30x30 targets and implementation with a wide range of stakeholders
5. Implementing 30x30 with conservation best practices – partnering with governments, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, NGOs, and other partners to implement durable, inclusive, and effectively managed conservation actions on-the-ground to meet 30x30 commitments in approximately 8-10 countries around the world
Now is the time to join our team and be part of this exciting movement to accelerate and improve the way nature is protected and conserved for the future.
Ideal candidates will have:
· Experience designing, implementing, and directly complex strategic initiatives across multiple geographies, including establishing a shared vision, budget, work plans, and outcome oversight.
· Experience with global biodiversity policies, 30x30 concept, conservation finance, and a variety of durable protection mechanisms. Familiarity with Indigenous Peoples rights and strategies for engaging Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in global and national level dialogues.
· Proven experience engaging and leading a multi-disciplinary, distributed team with no direct authority. Willingness to roll up sleeves and do the heavy lifting (this position has limited support capacity and no immediate direct reports).
Location for the position is flexible internationally but must be located in a country where TNC has an office. The Director will report to the Deputy Director for the Global Protect Oceans, Lands, and Waters program. See full job description and apply with resume and cover letter HERE
Deadline: Applications will be reviewed as they are received, and the position will remain open until filled.
About the Nature Conservancy
In the coming decade, we are facing the biggest, most complex challenges of our lives. And that calls for our biggest, most ambitious plans— for people and nature.
The Nature Conservancy, a global non-profit organization with more than a million members, is committed to the dual crises of rapid climate change and biodiversity loss. We have years, not decades, to address these existential threats. Consider, three quarters of the carbon dioxide emissions driven by humans has occurred since 1950. And over the last 40 years there has been nearly a 70 percent average decline of birds, amphibians, mammals, fish, and reptiles.
At The Nature Conservancy, we envision a world where the diversity of life thrives, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfill our needs and enrich our lives. We lead with our values—honoring Indigenous and local peoples’ voices, choices and actions. We ground our strategies in the places identified by our science—maximizing our ability to effect change for nature and the people who rely on it. We strive for multiple benefits, pursuing solutions that benefit biodiversity, sequester carbon and reduce risk to people most vulnerable to the harm of climate change. We leverage policy, partnerships, and finance mechanisms to advance conservation far beyond any one place.
Our mission drives us to conserve representative and resilient land, ocean, and freshwater habitats around the world so that people and nature thrive together. Conservation of these systems is built on a foundation of ecosystem protection, but our definition of "protect" is broader and more inclusive in today's warmer, more crowded world, where we face the interconnected global crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, and inequity
The science is clear. We must protect 30% of nature by 2030 to avoid irrecoverable damage to the planet’s ecosystems and our climate. The Nature Conservancy is deeply committed to this global goal, and its manifestation and delivery in different contexts around the world through global commitments such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and in the United States through the America the Beautiful Initiative. Achieving this goal will require a broad and inclusive definition of “protection” including efforts on private, Tribal and indigenous, and working lands and waters; and must ensure robust and just engagement of communities and their benefits. Collaboration across organizations as well as collaboration and coordination within TNC will be required to accelerate achievement of this ambitious and mission critical target.
The Nature Conservancy has a 70+ year history in the protection and effective management of critical ecosystems around the world in 75 countries and territories around the world. We have protected more than 51 million hectares of lands, 35 million hectares of ocean, and 8,000 kilometres of rivers through a wide range of conservation strategies. Some recent examples include the Belize Maya Forest acquisition of 95,500 high carbon and biodiversity hectares serving as an important corridor and protecting significant parts of two watersheds that provide water to one-third of all Belizeans; support to the Łutsël K’é Dene for the creation and management of Thaidene Nëné (“Land of the Ancestors” in Denesoline), a new 2.63 million hectare protected area; the newly announced Belize Blue Bond to unlock $180 million in funding to support Belize’s commitment to conserve 30% of the oceans; and a new partnership with TNC, The Pew Charitable Trusts, World Wildlife Fund and ZOMALAB to rapidly scale up Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) projects aligned with 30x30.
Given our extensive experience on the ground, as well as our global and regional thought leader expertise, we are uniquely poised to support global and national 30x30 commitment adoption and implementation for durable, effective, and inclusive benefits for people and nature.
We are launching a major initiative that leverages TNC’s extensive field experience with our global engagement and thought leadership to support key countries in their 30x30 commitments and implementation. The collective initiative builds on existing work to scale up our impact and engagement with partners around the world.