Nations are committed to ambitious biodiversity targets, set under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet evidence suggests mixed success in achieving past targets, revealing a mismatch between the rate of biodiversity decline and the rate at which biodiversity conservation is implemented. Conservation progress has been often impeded by the widespread disconnect between different conventions, the lack of international coordination, and the poor consideration of interactions between targets. These issues have made global biodiversity outcomes less effective than could have been the case. With a pressing need to improve the effectiveness of global conservation efforts, it is crucial that the conservation community improve upon existing targets, to have a better chance of ending the ongoing biodiversity crisis. In this talk I will discuss the opportunity for future targets to outline what is “sufficient” in conservation terms, and how nations can identify “efficient” ways to achieve these targets. I will illustrate the advantage of explicitly considering synergies and trade-offs when planning the achievement of multiple targets, such as the global reduction in extinction rates, the reduction of deforestation rates, and the protection of terrestrial carbon stocks.