Meeting global commitments to conservation, climate, and sustainable development requires consideration of synergies and tradeoffs among targets. We evaluate the spatial congruence of ecosystems providing globally high levels of nature’s contributions to people, biodiversity, and areas with high development potential across several sectors.
Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being addressing the global biodiversity crisis still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature’s diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property rights, which determine whose values and which values of nature are acted on. A better understanding of how and why nature is (under)valued is more urgent than ever.
This report was commissioned by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) to raise awareness and understanding of the tools available to evaluate Protected Area Management Effectiveness (PAME); to provide case studies from the region on PAME assessment; and to help inform decision-making when choosing tools and planning assessments.
Tropical countries are making ambitious commitments to Forest Landscape Restoration with the aim of locking up carbon, conserving biodiversity and benefiting local livelihoods. However, global and national analyses of restoration potential frequently ignore socio-legal complexities which impact both the effectiveness and equitability of restoration. We show that areas with the highest restoration potential are disproportionately found in countries with weak rule of law and frequently in those with substantial areas of unrecognised land tenure.
Community-based approaches to conservation and natural resource management are considered essential to meeting global conservation targets. Despite widespread adoption, there is little understanding about successful and unsuccessful community-based practices because of the challenges of designing robust evaluations to estimate impacts and analyse the underlying mechanisms to impact. Here we present findings from a national scale evaluation of the ‘locally managed marine areas’ network in Fiji, a marine community-based management initiative.
The Aleipata group of offshore islands have been identified as one of eight Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) in Samoa. They are located at the south-eastern end of Upolu Island at 14o3’447.28”S, 171o25’23.84”W (Nu’utele) and 14o4’22.11”S and 171o24’36.17”W (Nu’ulua) offshore. This project updates population estimates and establish baseline data and information on breeding seabirds of the Aleipata offshore islands and investigate the feasibility of future tracking studies of some species.
Conservation science is having a reckoning with “parachute science”. In the parachute science model, scientists drop into a foreign country with preconceived notions, seeking to validate their assumptions without genuine engagement with local people, ideas, epistemologies, methodologies, and knowledges, and leave without giving back to the place from which they extracted. This model lacks integrity and produces dubious results with little value to local populations and can even undermine local efforts.
Infrastructure development is a major threat to biodiversity, leading to habitat loss and fragmentation, increased accessibility and pollution. Key Biodiversity Areas represent the most comprehensive network of important areas for biodiversity and the prevalence of infrastructure in KBAs has not previously been described. Here we examined the prevalence of current and potential future infrastructure within the global network of 15,150 terrestrial KBAs, using a range of open and commercial spatial datasets related to infrastructure.
Eight percent of all land surface has been designated as “Key Biodiversity Areas” (KBAs). Since these areas were established based on two percent of all terrestrial species estimated to exist, we ask what would happen if we used all species on Earth to identify additional KBAs. We explore this question at a global scale by using data from 64,110 species of animals and plants to identify how many areas could qualify as KBAs under current criteria. We find that between 26% and 68% of the world’s terrestrial areas can be classified as KBAs, depending on the spatial resolution.
Community-based conservation can support livelihoods and biodiversity, while reinforcing local and Indigenous values, cultures, and institutions. Its delivery can help address cross-cutting global challenges, such as climate change, conservation, poverty, and food security. Therefore, understanding trends in community-based conservation is pertinent to setting and implementing global goals. We undertook a horizon scan to prioritize 15 emerging threats and opportunities expected to impact the future effectiveness of community-based conservation.