A New Way to Measure the World's Protected Area Coverage

Protected areas are effective at stopping biodiversity loss, but their placement is constrained by the needs of people. Consequently protected areas are often biased toward areas that are unattractive for other human uses. Current reporting metrics that emphasise the total area protected do not account for this bias. To address this problem we propose that the distribution of protected areas be evaluated with an economic metric used to quantify inequality in income— the Gini coefficient. Using a modified version of this measure we discover that 73% of countries have inequitably protected their biodiversity and that common measures of protected area coverage do not adequately reveal this bias. Used in combination with total percentage protection, the Gini coefficient will improve the effectiveness of reporting on the growth of protected area coverage, paving the way for better representation of the world's biodiversity

Are outcomes matching policy commitments in Australian marine conservation planning?

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are believed to be an effective means of preserving marine biodiversity. Hence, MPAs have become the cornerstone of many national and international strategies for decelerating the loss of marine biodiversity. Australia has made strong international commitments to increase its coverage of MPAs through the principles of systematic conservation planning and, in the last 10 years, has rapidly expanded its MPA coverage using these principles. This paper assesses Australia's progress in achieving a key principle of systematic conservation planning-representation-which states that MPAs will include the full range of marine ecosystems. Australia's progress in achieving representation is measured nationally and within seven extensive commonwealth marine regions: the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (rezoned in 2004), the South East Marine Regional Plan (2007), and the South West, North West, North, Temperate East and Coral Sea proposed plans (2011). State marine waters (within 3 nautical miles of the coast) are not considered. Results illustrate that, if the proposed marine plans are followed verbatim, Australia will protect just over 36% of its marine jurisdiction in MPAs and over 13% in "no-take" marine reserves. However, except for MPAs in the Great Barrier Reef, and the proposal for the Coral Sea marine park, the existing and proposed MPAs are far from representative. Importantly, only a small portion of the highest protection occurs on the continental shelf where activities potentially harmful to marine biodiversity are concentrated. Despite having a strong and long-standing commitment to the principles of systematic conservation planning, Australia is not achieving the fundamental requirement of representation across most of its marine jurisdiction. We conclude that a failure to set quantitative targets is restricting the achievement of representative marine protection in Australia. Consequently, the 2004 rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef remains a model to emulate, not only in other countries, but in other parts of Australia's marine waters

Progress in improving the protection of species and habitats in Australia

Historically, protected areas were often designated using criteria other than biodiversity conservation as the primary objective. With the emergence of the science of systematic conservation planning, the designation of new protected areas is increasingly made with explicit conservation objectives in mind. However, assessments of the performance of protected area systems typically include all protected areas, regardless of when they were designated, potentially obscuring recent improvements in conservation planning decisions. Thus, it is often unclear to what extent systematic conservation planning principles have influenced the placement of new protected areas. Here, we compare recently designated protected areas in Australia with the protected area system that existed prior to the introduction of systematic conservation planning guidelines in 2000. We ask whether there is a difference between past and recent protection in terms of (i) the size and spatial distribution of protected areas, (ii) the characteristics of broad regions in which protection is concentrated, and (iii) the extent to which protected areas represent ecosystems and threatened species in comparison with selecting protected areas at random. We find that the protected area system was historically biased toward areas with steep slopes and low human populations. In contrast, recent protection is more likely to be allocated to regions with high human population and high numbers of threatened species; we show that this effect is not simply a result of biases in the places now available for conservation. Despite this successful realignment of practice, we find that the increase in protected area coverage in poorly protected regions has occurred more slowly than expected if protected area selections were fully guided by systematic conservation planning principles. Our results demonstrate rapid progress in improving Australia's protected area system in the last decade, and highlight the importance of separating recent from historical additions to the protected area system when measuring the performance of conservation decision-making