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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.

Forests are host to most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world’s biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world’s forests. The role of forests in maintaining biodiversity is also explicitly recognized by the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017– 2030 and in the ongoing discussions around the forthcoming post-2020 global biodiversity framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Recognizing two decades of failure to achieve global goals and targets, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are in the final phase of negotiating a Post-   2020 Global Biodiversity Framework for the conservation, sustainable use and benefit sharing of biodiversity. The framework attempts to set out path-ways, goals and targets for the next decade to achieve positive biodiversity change. This perspective intends to help that framework set people firmly as part of nature, not apart from it.

Other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) represent unique opportunities to help achieve the 2030 biodiversity conservation agenda. However, potential misuse by governments and economic sectors could compromise the outcome of these conservation efforts. Here, we propose three ways to ensure that the application of OECMs toward meeting biodiversity targets provide benefits for both people and nature.

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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. 

Achieving the target to conserve 30% of land and sea requires strong emphasis on equity. Equity in conservation is a matter of governance and includes recognition and respect for actors and their human and resource rights, equity in procedure (e.g., participation, accountability) and equitable cost/benefit distribution. Equity in conservation is crucial both for ethical reasons and for effective conservation and applies both to conservation actions on site, and to complementary actions designed to support conservation (e.g., stewardship incentives, support for local schools).

This Technical Note provides advice to managers of protected and conserved areas1 (PCAs) for applying a ‘One Health’ approach for the benefit of environmental, animal, and human health.

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Comprehensive, spatially explicit data that include regulatory information are essential for evaluating the level of protection that marine protected areas (MPAs) and other marine managed areas (MMAs) provide to marine life, and to inform progress towards ocean protection targets. An analysis based on the ProtectedSeas database, which includes information on regulated activities, found that 85% of U.S.

Marine protected areas (MPAs), particularly large MPAs, are increasing in number and size around the globe in part to facilitate the conservation of marine megafauna under the assumption that large-scale MPAs better align with vagile life histories; however, this alignment is not well established. Using a global tracking dataset from 36 species across five taxa, chosen to reflect the span of home range size in highly mobile marine megafauna, we show most MPAs are too small to encompass complete home ranges of most species.

The vulnerability of marine biodiversity to accelerated rates of climatic change is poorly understood. By developing a new method for identifying extreme oceanic warming events during Earth's most recent deglaciation, and comparing these to 21st century projections, we show that future rates of ocean warming will disproportionately affect the most speciose marine communities, potentially threatening biodiversity in more than 70% of current-day global hotspots of marine species richness.