To reverse this trend, our team worked with the Chinese government to provide more financial support to the local community in the early 2000s. This increased household incomes and reduced the need to harvest wood.

Taking a broad geographic view of the pandas’ situation helped to produce a positive outcome. Recognizing that panda habitat was being affected not just by human-nature interactions inside Wolong but also by interactions between Wolong and adjacent and distant places showed that conservation subsidies from the faraway central government in Beijing could improve protection for Wolong forests.

In 2016 the International Union for Conservation of Nature downlisted and reclassified giant pandas from endangered to vulnerable. Today there are an estimated 1,800 giant pandas in the wild, thanks partly to government subsidies that helped strike a balance between humans’ needs and those of pandas.

All protected areas are influenced by human actions both nearby and far away. We believe that creating and managing protected areas using a holistic metacoupling approach will make it easier to achieve the 30x30 goal and make sound decisions that sustain nature and human well-being around the world.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Veronica Frans, Michigan State University and Jianguo "Jack" Liu, Michigan State University. If you found it interesting, you could subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

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Veronica Frans receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Jianguo "Jack" Liu receives funding from National Science Foundation and Michiga AgBioResearch.