Abstract
The United States, like most other nations, has committed to protecting 30% of its land and oceans by 2030—known as 30-by-30—concurrent with societal goals such as reversing ‘inequitable access to the outdoors’. Although protected areas (PAs) in the United States are generally closer to wealthier and less racially diverse neighbourhoods, we find that marine PAs are closer to wealthier but more racially diverse neighbourhoods compared with terrestrial PAs. Achieving 30-by-30 may exacerbate inequitable access to nature because it will require more PAs inland, instead of near diverse coastal cities.
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Data availability
Spatial data on Marine and TPAs in the United States was downloaded from The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA)5. Separate downloads were conducted for individual Protected Areas under ‘Type: Marine’ for MPAs and ‘Type: Terrestrial’ for TPAs. Additional filters used for each of the Marine and TPA downloads include ‘Country: United States of America’ and ‘IUCN Category: Ia’. The data used in our analysis were downloaded on 28 April 2022.
Spatial income and race data at the Block Group level were downloaded from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series National Historical Geographic Information System (IPUMS-NHGIS)7. Filters used include ‘Geographic Levels: BLCK_GRP’, ‘Years: 2020’, ‘Topics: Race OR Household and Family Income’. Under ‘Source Tables’, we selected the Tables ‘B02001. Race’ and ‘B19013. Median Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2020 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars)’. Under ‘GIS Files’, we selected ‘Year: 2020’, ‘Extent: United States’ and ‘Basis: 2020 TIGER/Line +’. The data used in our analysis were downloaded on 28 April 2022.
A shapefile of the US coastline was downloaded because we wanted to analyse Block Groups on the coast when analysing MPAs. The shapefile was downloaded from the US Census Bureau19. The basis for the shapefile is the 2019 TIGER/Line +, which is no different from the 2020 TIGER/Line +. The data used in our analysis were downloaded on 28 April 2022.
The shapefile of the US coastline includes both marine and freshwater coastlines. To be consistent with the US Census Bureau infographic on ‘Coastline America’ (https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/demo/coastline-america.html), we downloaded an MS Excel file with a list of US counties on the coast and used that to eliminate Block Groups on freshwater coastlines20. We also used this list of counties to investigate inequality at the county level. The data used in our analysis were downloaded on 9 June 2022. All data are available in the main text or the Supplementary Information.
Code availability
The code used for data download, clean-up, merging and analysis are available on FigShare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23716650).
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Acknowledgements
A.L.A. acknowledges the support of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) SSH Open Competition Pilot 2022–2023 grant 406.XS.01.073. J.L. acknowledges the US National Science Foundation, specifically grant DISES 2108566.
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A.L.A. and J.L. conceptualized the project. A.L.A., M.v.A. and J.L. developed the methodology. A.L.A. and M.v.A. conducted investigations. A.L.A. and J.L. performed visualization. A.L.A. administered and supervised the project. A.L.A., M.v.A. and J.L. wrote the original draft, and reviewed and edited the paper.
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Nature Sustainability thanks Yong Ge, Hao Zhang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Text, Fig. 1–8, and Tables 1 and 2.
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Abatayo, A.L., van Adrichem, M. & Lynham, J. Comparing access to US marine and terrestrial protected areas. Nat Sustain 7, 255–259 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01274-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01274-1
