Indicator 15.1.2 Proportion of important sites for terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity that are covered by protected areas, by ecosystem type

Indicator 15.1.2: Proportion of important sites for terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity that are covered by protected areas, by ecosystem type

Target 15.1: By 2020, ensure the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems and their services, in particular forests, wetlands, mountains and drylands, in line with obligations under international agreements

BirdLife International (BLI)

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC)

Definition:

The indicator Proportion of important sites for terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity that are covered by protected areas, by ecosystem type shows temporal trends in the mean percentage of each important site for terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity (i.e., those that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity) that is covered by designated protected areas and Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs).

Concepts:

Protected areas, as defined by the IUCN (IUCN; Dudley 2008), are clearly defined geographical spaces, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.

Percent (%) (Mean percentage of each terrestrial/freshwater Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) covered by (i.e. overlapping with) protected areas and/or OECMs.)

Protected area data are compiled by ministries of environment and other ministries responsible for the designation and maintenance of protected areas. Protected Areas data for sites designated under the Ramsar Convention and the UNESCO World Heritage Convention are collected through the relevant convention international secretariats. Protected area data are aggregated globally into the WDPA by UNEP-WCMC, according to the mandate for production of the United Nations List of Protected Areas (Deguignet et al. 2014). They are disseminated through Protected Planet, which is jointly managed by UNEP-WCMC and IUCN and its World Commission on Protected Areas (UNEP-WCMC 2016).

Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) are collated in the WDOECM. This database can be regarded as a sister database to the WDPA as it is also hosted on Protected Planet. Furthermore, the databases share many of the same fields and have an almost identical workflow; differing only in what they list. OECMs are a quickly evolving area of work, as such for the latest information on OECMs and the WDOECM please contact UNEP-WCMC.

KBAs are identified at national scales through multi-stakeholder processes, following standard criteria and thresholds. KBAs data are aggregated into the World Database on

KBAs, managed by BirdLife International.

Protected area data are compiled by ministries of environment and other ministries responsible for the designation and maintenance of protected areas. KBAs are identified at national scales through multi-stakeholder processes, following established processes and standard criteria and thresholds (see above for details).

Quality control criteria are applied to ensure consistency and comparability of the data in the WDPA. New data are validated at UNEP-WCMC through a number of tools and translated into the standard data structure of the WDPA. Discrepancies between the data in the WDPA and new data are minimised by provision of a manual (UNEP-WCMC 2019) and resolved in communication with data providers. Similar processes apply for the incorporation of data into the WDKBA (BirdLife International 2019).

The indicator does not measure the effectiveness of protected areas in reducing biodiversity loss, which ultimately depends on a range of management and enforcement factors not covered by the indicator. A number of initiatives are underway to address this limitation. Most notably, numerous mechanisms have been developed for assessment of protected area management, which can be synthesised into an indicator (Leverington et al. 2010). This is used by the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership as a complementary indicator of progress towards Aichi Biodiversity Target 11

(http://www.bipindicators.net/pamanagement). However, there may be little relationship between these measures and protected area outcomes (Nolte & Agrawal 2013). More recently, approaches to “green listing” have started to be developed, to incorporate both management effectiveness and the outcomes of protected areas, and these are likely to become progressively important as they are tested and applied more broadly.

Data and knowledge gaps can arise due to difficulties in determining whether a site conforms to the IUCN definition of a protected area or the CBD definition of an OECM. However, given that both are incorporated into the indicator, misclassifications (as one or the other) do not impact the calculated indicator value.

Regarding important sites, the biggest limitation is that site identification to date has focused mainly on specific subsets of biodiversity, for example birds (for Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas) and highly threatened species (for Alliance for Zero Extinction sites). While Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas have been documented to be good surrogates for biodiversity more generally (Brooks et al. 2001, Pain et al. 2005), the application of the unified standard for identification of KBA sites (IUCN 2016) across different levels of biodiversity (genes, species, ecosystems) and different taxonomic groups remains a high priority, building from efforts to date (Eken et al. 2004, Knight et al. 2007, Langhammer et al. 2007, Foster et al. 2012). Birds now comprise less than 50% of the species for which KBAs have been identified, and as KBA identification for other taxa and elements of biodiversity proceeds, such bias will become a less important consideration in the future.

KBA identification has been validated for a number of countries and regions where comprehensive biodiversity data allow formal calculation of the site importance (or “irreplaceability”) using systematic conservation planning techniques (Di Marco et al. 2016, Montesino Pouzols et al. 2014).

Future developments of the indicator will include: a) expansion of the taxonomic coverage of KBAs through application of the KBA standard (IUCN 2016) to a wide variety of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants and ecosystem type; b) improvements in the data on protected areas by continuing to increase the proportion of sites with documented dates of designation and with digitised boundary polygons (rather than coordinates); and c) increased documentation of Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures in the World Database of OECMs.

This indicator is calculated from data derived from a spatial overlap between digital polygons for protected areas from the World Database on Protected Areas (UNEP-WCMC & IUCN 2020), digital polygons for Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures from the World Database on OECMs and digital polygons for terrestrial and freshwater Key Biodiversity Areas (from the World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas, including Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas, Alliance for Zero Extinction sites, and other Key Biodiversity Areas).

Sites were classified as terrestrial Key Biodiversity Areas by undertaking a spatial overlap between the Key Biodiversity Area polygons and an ocean raster layer (produced from the ‘adm0’ layer from the database of Global Administrative Areas (GADM 2019)), classifying any Key Biodiversity Area as a terrestrial Key Biodiversity Area where it had ≤95% overlap with the ocean layer (hence some sites were classified as both terrestrial and marine).

Sites were classified as freshwater Key Biodiversity Areas if the resident species for which they were identified were documented in the IUCN Red List as dependent on ‘Inland Water’ systems. For non-resident or migrant species, or species that shift habitats during the annual cycle, the site was tagged as freshwater if the species occurred at the site in the appropriate season of water-dependence (e.g. some species are only dependent on water during the breeding season). Sites were then screened (using the satellite imagery base layer within ArcGIS) as to whether they lay wholly in the Coastal Zone (defined here as within 10 km of the coast), and these sites were then untagged as Freshwater and instead tagged as Marine if the wetland habitats present at the site fell purely within the IUCN Habitat Classification Scheme class ‘Marine Supratidal’ (i.e. estuaries, lagoons, etc.). If the site was within the Coastal Zone, but contained a mixture of Marine Supratidal and Inland Water classes, then it was tagged as both Freshwater and Marine. Each site was then manually cross-checked against other (less comprehensively available) site attributes, such as the habitat preferences of its trigger species, the site’s name (Delta, River, Humedal, etc.), its areal coverage by different habitat types, its overlap with Ramsar Sites, and its ‘shadow’ Ramsar status, so as to confirm or remove the Freshwater tag appropriately. The value of the indicator at a given point in time, based on data on the year of protected area establishment recorded in the World Database on Protected Areas, is computed as the mean percentage of each Key Biodiversity Area currently recognised that is covered by protected areas and/or Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures.

Protected areas lacking digital boundaries in the World Database of Protected Areas, and those sites with a status of ‘proposed’ or ‘not reported’ are omitted. Degazetted sites are not kept in the WDPA and are also not included. Man and Biosphere Reserves are also excluded as these often contain potentially unprotected areas. Year of protected area establishment is unknown for ~12% of protected areas in the World Database on Protected Areas, generating uncertainty around changing protected area coverage over time. To reflect this uncertainty, a year was randomly assigned from another protected area within the same country, and then this procedure repeated 1,000 times, with the median plotted.

Prior to 2017, the indicator was presented as the percentage of Key Biodiversity Areas completely covered by protected areas. However, it is now presented as the mean % of each Key Biodiversity Area that is covered by protected areas in order to better reflect trends in protected area coverage for countries or regions with few or no Key Biodiversity Areas that are completely covered.

2024-07-29

BirdLife International (BLI)

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC)

UN Environment Programme

Other relevant indicators include:

SDG 14.5.1 Coverage of protected areas in relation to marine areas.

SDG 15.4.1 Coverage by protected areas of important sites for mountain biodiversity.

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