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A toolkit to support conservation by indigenous peoples and local communities: Building capacity and sharing knowledge for Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs)

Local communities and indigenous peoples make substantial contributions to global conservation efforts and sustainable development. While these communities are often the primary ‘resource stewards’ who rely on ecosystems to meet food security, livelihood and health needs, their contribution to the achievement of global conservation targets have not yet been fully recognized...This toolkit presents a selection of practical resources, developed by numerous organisations, making them readily accessible to community-based organisations who manage ICCAs.

Motivations to Support Marine Conservation Projects in North Tarawa, Kiribati

Local communities’ support for resource conservation projects are essential for their success. Nevertheless, in the Pacific Island countries, many community-based conservation (CBC) projects remain ineffective due to the lack of community members’ engagement. To better understand the motivations of local community members to support resource conservation projects; this research looks at the four community-based conservation sites in North Tarawa, Kiribati.

Priority Sites for Conservation in Kiribati: Key Biodiversity Areas

This KBA report outlines key recommendations for the Government of Kiribati and its people for protecting its unique biodiversity and supporting sustainable livelihoods. A total of twenty-two island KBAs were identified and suggested for immediate management. Outlined below are the identified KBAs in order of their recommended priority rankings for each island group...The finding of Kiribati's KBA analysis provides a sound link to several significant ongoing and new initiatives within the environment division and at the national level.

Use of surrogate species to cost-effectively prioritize conservation actions

Conservation efforts often focus on umbrella species whose distributions overlap with many other flora and fauna. However, because biodiversity is affected by different threats that are spatially variable, focusing only on the geographic range overlap of species may not be sufficient in allocating the necessary actions needed to efficiently abate threats. We developed a problem-based method for prioritizing conservation actions for umbrella species that maximizes the total number of flora and fauna benefiting from management while considering threats, actions, and costs.

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Addressing Barriers to Effective Conservation Evaluation

Evaluation, the process of assessing the effectiveness of programs and activities, has gained increasing attention in the conservation sector as programs seek to account for investments, measure their impacts, and adapt interventions to improve future outcomes. We conducted a country-wide evaluation of terrestrial-based conservation programs in Samoa. Though rarely applied, the benefit of evaluating multiple projects at once is that it highlights factors which are persistent and influential across the entire conservation sector.

Protected area targets post-2020

In 2010, Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, and its 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, to catalyze national and international conservation efforts and reverse negative biodiversity trends. With the plan nearing an end, and attention turning toward a post 2020 biodiversity framework, it is timely to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness of the Aichi Targets.

full Paper [Pdf]

A Global Standard for the Identification of Key Biodiversity Areas

The KBA Standard is formally taken to include definitions, the criteria and thresholds, and delineation procedures. It can be used by national constituencies to identify sites contributing significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity in terrestrial, inland water and marine environments. It is important that this Standard remains stable for a period of time to enable comparisons of sites qualifying as KBAs in different regions and over time.

THE IUCN WORLD COMMISSION ON PROTECTED AREAS OCEANIA Newsletter No. 1 2019

The first edition of the Newsletter of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Oceania (2019). IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) is the world's premier network of protected area expertise. It is administered by IUCN's Global Programme on Protected Areas and has over 2,000 members, spanning 140 countries. 

Full Newsletter (Pdf)

Managing the middle: A shift in conservation priorities based on the global human modification gradient

An increasing number of international initiatives aim to reconcile development with conservation. Crucial to successful implementation of these initiatives is a comprehensive understanding of the current ecological condition of landscapes and their spatial distributions. Here, we provide a cumulative measure of human modification of terrestrial lands based on modeling the physical extents of 13 anthropogenic stressors and their estimated impacts using spatially explicit global datasets with a median year of 2016.