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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.

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.

This paper identifies the Dasgupta Review’s key points about the role of protected areas (PAs) in conserving nature. Using these factors as a foundation, this paper explores how economists can conduct analyses that improve PA decisions and promote both biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision. People’s interactions with PAs should be considered when making design, management, and restrictions decisions about PAs because those interactions are critical to determining the threats to biodiversity within PAs and the benefits produced by PAs.

Expanding the global protected area network is critical for addressing biodiversity declines and the climate crisis. However, how climate change will affect ecosystem representation within the protected area network remains unclear. Here we use spatial climate analogs to examine potential climate-driven shifts in terrestrial ecoregions and biomes under a +2 °C warming scenario and associated implications for achieving 30% area-based protection targets.

More than 15% of global terrestrial area is under some form of protection and there is a growing impetus to increase this coverage to 30% by 2030. But not all protection is effective and the reasons some countries’ protected areas (PAs) are more effective than others’ are poorly understood. We evaluate the effectiveness of national PA networks established between 2000 and 2012 globally in avoiding forest loss, taking into account underlying deforestation threats using a combination of matching methods and cross-sectional regressions.