Monitoring

Island ecosystems are disproportionally impacted by biodiversity loss and as such their effective management is critical to global conservation efforts. Practitioners worldwide work to manage island sites and species to conserve them, but various day-to-day barriers compromise these efforts, reducing management effectiveness and preventing local and potentially even national biodiversity targets from being met.

Protected Areas (PAs) are the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation. Here, we collated distributional data for >14,000 (~70% of) species of amphibians and reptiles (herpetofauna) to perform a global assessment of the conservation effectiveness of PAs using species distribution models. Our analyses reveal that >91% of herpetofauna species are currently distributed in PAs, and that this proportion will remain unaltered under future climate change. Indeed, loss of species’ distributional ranges will be lower inside PAs than outside them.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are ubiquitous in global ocean conservation and play a pivotal role in achieving local, national, and regional area-based conservation targets. Often, such targets are merely met on “paper” and lack the political or managerial resources to produce positive conservation outcomes. Here, we apply the MPA Guide – a framework for assessing the quantity and quality of marine protected areas – to Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), two U.S. territories in the Western Pacific.

Conserving our sea of islands: State of protected and conserved areas in Oceania is a landmark publication, bringing together regional and international experts to prepare the first comprehensive review of the status and issues for protected and conserved areas in the region. The report embodies the spirit of the late scholar Epeli Hau’ofa, who devised the phrase ‘Our Sea of Islands’ to help re-imagine the region as selfdetermined ‘Big Ocean States’ connected to place and each other – ideas that underpin conservation.

The growing need for effective tools and new approaches for natural resource management (NRM) is being met by PNG’s NRM Hub initiative, which is already helping to centralise environmental data and make it accessible to stakeholders everywhere. One tool in particular is finding great use  – the Managing Effectiveness Tracking Tool, or METT, a global framework customised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to meet PNG’s unique environment and cultures. 

The aim of the National Protected Areas Forum was to fulfill mandates and strengthen policies to protect the country’s abundant natural assets into the future to benefit all life and future generations. Led by the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA) with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Day 3 session of the recent Vi

Day 1 session of the recent Vi

Day 2 session of the recent Vi

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a primary tool for the stewardship, conservation, and restoration of marine ecosystems, yet 69% of global MPAs are only partially protected (i.e., are open to some form of fishing). Although fully protected areas have well-documented outcomes, including increased fish diversity and biomass, the effectiveness of partially protected areas is contested.