30 x 30 Campaign

The first meeting of the 30 x 30 Campaign for Western New York will be held at 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, Nov. 11 at the Buffalo Museum of Science, 1020 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo.

Is one-third of your yard biodiverse? Does it have native plants and bees and other animals? If not, could you take steps toward more biodiversity?

That small idea is just one part of the 30 x 30 Campaign for Western New York, which aims to have biodiversity on 30 percent of Western New York land and waters by 2030.

You could help by changing a bit of your yard, or parks in your town, or forests in your county, or waterways that flow through Western New York.

“We want to save the Arctic and the Amazon, but there is a lot of work we can do right here,” said Jay Burney, advocacy chair for the Western New York Environmental Alliance, a coalition of independent environmental organizations that has announced the campaign.

A first step toward getting organized is to create a council or steering committee for 30 x 30. Burney emphasized that this won’t be a top-down situation. What they are looking for are individuals and groups who know what is needed in their area of Western New York.

“We want to recruit others to collaborate,” he said. “We need different voices.”

They want to find out:

• What do you know?
• What do you think?
• What can we do collectively?
• What can we do individually?

There is a lot to learn. For example, the full aim of 30 x 30 is to “identify and protect 30 percent of ecologically productive land and waters.” So what are ecologically productive land and waters?

That hasn’t been defined yet, but “it’s not parking lots or manicured lawns treated with pesticides,” Burney said.

What percentage of ecologically productive land and waters do we currently have in Western New York? We don’t know yet, he added. The aim is to identify and conserve the land and waters.

The 30 x 30 Campaign for Western New York follows in the steps of initiatives of the United States and the State of New York.

Agenda for the 30 x 30 meeting

Welcome and Introduction
John Whitney, President of Western New York Environmental Alliance

New York State’s Commitment to 30 x 30
Julie Barrett O’Neill, New York State DEC Region 9 Director

The Importance of Biodiversity
Margaret Wooster, Western New York Environmental Alliance

The Western New York Wildway
Marcus Rosten,  Wildway Director, Western New York Land Conservancy

The Niagara River Greenway
Greg Stevens, Chair, Niagara River Greenway Commission

30 x 30 Action Planning and Agenda
Jay Burney, Advocacy Chair, Western New York Environmental Alliance

The presentations will be followed by about one hour of general discussion.