Management

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.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) marks one of the most ambitious environmental agreements of the 21st century. Yet despite the ambition, and the considerable change in approach since negotiating its predecessor (the 2025 Vision and Aichi targets), the many pressures, including working through a global pandemic mean that the final agreement, despite several years of delay, is weaker than might have been hoped for.

This document is a guide along the path to realizing Target 3 of the KMGBF. It guides us through the text of the Target itself, breaking down all of the elements and, perhaps most importantly, it is loaded with links to more details. The path it offers leads to effective implementation through equitable and human rights-based action. It is a big guide for a big job. The development of this guide is a small example of the kind of cooperation and hard work that we need to succeed in Target 3.

Protected areas are essential to biodiversity conservation. Creating new parks can protect larger populations and more species, yet strengthening existing parks, particularly those vulnerable to harmful human activities, is a critical but underappreciated step for safeguarding at-risk species. Here, we model the area of habitat that terrestrial mammals, amphibians, and birds have within park networks and their vulnerability to current downgrading, downsizing, or de-gazettement events and future land-use change.

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.

Motivated by declines in biodiversity exacerbated by climate change, we identified a network of conservation sites designed to provide resilient habitat for species, while supporting dynamic shifts in ranges and changes in ecosystem composition. Our 12-ystudy involved 289 scientists in 14 study regions across the conterminous United States(CONUS), and our intent was to support local-, regional-, and national-scale conservation decisions.

We are in the midst of a major biodiversity crisis, with deep impacts on the functioning of ecosystems and derived benefits to people (1, 2). But we still have time to pull back. To do so, it is imperative that we learn from plants’ and animals’ past actions (3, 4). Conservation biology, ecology, and paleontology all emphasize that natural systems must exhibit resilience and dynamic responses to rapid environmental changes (3, 5, 6). Both climate and land-use change have accelerated over the past decades, underscoring the urgency for increased understanding and action (7–9).

The CKI OECM Workshop Report consolidates the discussions, outcomes, recommendations and next steps following the Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures Workshop, hosted by the National Environment Service, in partnership with Secretariat of Pacific Regional Environment Program and the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, on the 24th - 25th January 2023 in Rarotonga, Cook Islands.  

Many protected areas worldwide increasingly resemble habitat isolates embedded in human-modifed landscapes. However, establishing linkages among protected areas could signifcantly reduce speciesloss rates. Here we present a novel method having broad applicability for assessing enhanced regional connectivity on persistence of mammal diversity. We combine theoretically-derived species relaxation rates for mammal communities with empirically-derived pathways.