In alignment with the global initiative to slow biodiversity loss, the European Union has committed to ambitious area-based conservation and restoration targets for the upcoming decade. Ensuring that these area-based targets are meaningfully achieved, while land requirements for commodity production and climate mitigation targets met, will require strategic planning across land uses, management measures, and jurisdictional boundaries. In this study we spatially optimize the allocation of restoration and conservation measures across different land-cover types to maximize species conservation and carbon sequestration objectives, subject to projected crop, pasture, and forestry production constraints by 2030. We show how simultaneously prioritizing landscapes for restoration and conservation can significantly improve the efficacy and coherence of area-based conservation initiatives compared to currently available disparate optimization of these measures. Additionally, we explore the impact of multilateral burden sharing and multi-objective weightings on optimal land allocation for production and the expected biodiversity and climate mitigation benefits of
proposed solutions. Our results provide insight for the implementation of timely EU policy measures and a baseline for EU member states to evaluate the potential of their conservation pledges. Moreover, the methodology can easily be adopted to different contexts around the world and showcase how conservation planning can meaningfully optimize land allocation needs for both nature and people.