Prevent perverse outcomes from global protected area policy

Aichi Target 11 has galvanized expansion of the global protected area network, but there is little evidence that this brings real biodiversity gains. We argue that area-based prioritization risks unintended perverse consequences and that the focus of protected area target development should shift from quantity to quality

A global analysis of management capacity and ecological outcomes in terrestrial protected areas

Protecting important sites is a key strategy for halting the loss of biodiversity. However, our understanding of the relationship between management inputs and biodiversity outcomes in protected areas (PAs) remains weak. Here, we examine biodiversity outcomes using species population trends in PAs derived from the Living Planet Database in relation to management data derived from the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) database for 217 population time-series from 73 PAs. We found a positive relationship between our METT-based scores for Capacity and Resources and changes in vertebrate abundance, consistent with the hypothesis that PAs require adequate resourcing to halt biodiversity loss. Additionally, PA age was negatively correlated with trends for the mammal subsets and PA size negatively correlated with population trends in the global subset. Our study highlights the paucity of appropriate data for rigorous testing of the role of management in maintaining species populations across multiple sites, and describes ways to improve our understanding of PA performance

Standardized reporting of the costs of management interventions for biodiversity conservation

Effective conservation management interventions must combat threats and deliver conservation benefits at costs that can be achieved within limited budgets. Considerable effort has focused on measuring the potential benefits of conservation interventions but explicit quantification of implementation costs has been rare. Even when costs have been quantified, haphazard and inconsistent reporting means that published values are difficult to interpret. This reporting deficiency hinders progress towards building a collective understanding of the costs of management interventions across projects, and thus limits our ability to identify efficient solutions to conservation problems or attract adequate funding. We address this challenge by proposing a standardized approach to describing costs reported for conservation interventions. These standards call for researchers and practitioners to ensure the cost data they collect and report on provide enough contextual information that readers and future users can interpret the data appropriately. We suggest these standards be adopted by major conservation organizations, conservation science institutions, and journals, so that cost reporting is comparable between studies. This would support shared learning and enhance our ability to identify and perform cost-effective conservation.Funding was provided by CEED (GDI and workshop), an ARC Laureate Fellowship (HPP, BM, VA and JM), Arcadia (WJS), the Natural Environment Research Council (LVD, NE/K015419/1; NE/N014472/1) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (AJP)

Wildlife population trends in protected areas predicted by national socio-economic metrics and body size.

Ensuring that protected areas (PAs) maintain the biodiversity within their boundaries is fundamental in achieving global conservation goals. Despite this objective, wildlife abundance changes in PAs are patchily documented and poorly understood. Here, we use linear mixed effect models to explore correlates of population change in 1,902 populations of birds and mammals from 447 PAs globally. On an average, we find PAs are maintaining populations of monitored birds and mammals within their boundaries. Wildlife population trends are more positive in PAs located in countries with higher development scores, and for larger-bodied species. These results suggest that active management can consistently overcome disadvantages of lower reproductive rates and more severe threats experienced by larger species of birds and mammals. The link between wildlife trends and national development shows that the social and economic conditions supporting PAs are critical for the successful maintenance of their wildlife populations

Protecting Important Sites for Biodiversity Contributes to Meeting Global Conservation Targets

Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of conservation efforts and now cover nearly 13% of the world's land surface, with the world's governments committed to expand this to 17%. However, as biodiversity continues to decline, the effectiveness of PAs in reducing the extinction risk of species remains largely untested. We analyzed PA coverage and trends in species' extinction risk at globally significant sites for conserving birds (10,993 Important Bird Areas, IBAs) and highly threatened vertebrates and conifers (588 Alliance for Zero Extinction sites, AZEs) (referred to collectively hereafter as ‘important sites’). Species occurring in important sites with greater PA coverage experienced smaller increases in extinction risk over recent decades: the increase was half as large for bird species with>50% of the IBAs at which they occur completely covered by PAs, and a third lower for birds, mammals and amphibians restricted to protected AZEs (compared with unprotected or partially protected sites). Globally, half of the important sites for biodiversity conservation remain unprotected (49% of IBAs, 51% of AZEs). While PA coverage of important sites has increased over time, the proportion of PA area covering important sites, as opposed to less important land, has declined (by 0.45–1.14% annually since 1950 for IBAs and 0.79–1.49% annually for AZEs). Thus, while appropriately located PAs may slow the rate at which species are driven towards extinction, recent PA network expansion has under-represented important sites. We conclude that better targeted expansion of PA networks would help to improve biodiversity trends

Capacity shortfalls hinder the performance of marine protected areas globally

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly being used globally to conserve marine resources. However, whether many MPAs are being effectively and equitably managed, and how MPA management influences substantive outcomes remain unknown. We developed a global database of management and fish population data (433 and 218 MPAs, respectively) to assess: MPA management processes; the effects of MPAs on fish populations; and relationships between management processes and ecological effects. Here we report that many MPAs failed to meet thresholds for effective and equitable management processes, with widespread shortfalls in staff and financial resources. Although 71% of MPAs positively influenced fish populations, these conservation impacts were highly variable. Staff and budget capacity were the strongest predictors of conservation impact: MPAs with adequate staff capacity had ecological effects 2.9 times greater than MPAs with inadequate capacity. Thus, continued global expansion of MPAs without adequate investment in human and financial capacity is likely to lead to sub-optimal conservation outcomes

Fine-grained data and models of protected-area management costs reveal cryptic effects of budget shortfalls

Protected area managers face the considerable challenge of trying to achieve all of their sites', often diverse, management objectives with limited budgets. Typically, managers lack sufficient resources to carry out all the management activities required. Therefore, managers must prioritise actions and decide on trade-offs between objectives. Here we present fine-grained data on management spending for 41 protected area management units in Queensland, Australia, that demonstrate the trade-offs between objectives that managers are being required to make. Our results show that, in these reserves, the managers are often prioritising actions directed towards visitors' experience, to the detriment of actions focused on biodiversity management. We modelled these data to explore the characteristics of protected areas that influence the costs of their management. We found that total management spending was correlated with a wide range of factors, especially the amount of built infrastructure within each PA. These new data show that the effects of budgetary shortfalls are having a disproportionate but cryptic negative impact on biodiversity protection. Our study has two important implications. First, unless carefully structured techniques are used to obtain data on both current and required spending for protected area management, funding shortfalls cannot be properly estimated. Second, to the extent that the same kinds of trade-offs – to the detriment of biodiversity conservation – are being made in other protected areas as in those covered by our study, figures on overall shortfalls in management spending will underestimate the shortfalls for activities directed at the persistence of biodiversity

Understanding local-scale drivers of biodiversity outcomes in terrestrial protected areas

Conservation relies heavily on protected areas (PAs) maintaining their key biodiversity features to meet global biodiversity conservation goals. However, PAs have had variable success, with many failing to fully maintain their biodiversity features. The current literature concerning what drives variability in PA performance is rapidly expanding but unclear, sometimes contradictory, and spread across multiple disciplines. A clear understanding of the drivers of successful biodiversity conservation in PAs is necessary to make them fully effective. Here, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of the current state of knowledge concerning the drivers of biological outcomes within PAs, focusing on those that can be addressed at local scales. We evaluate evidence in support of potential drivers to identify those that enable more successful outcomes and those that impede success and provide a synthetic review. Interactions are discussed where they are known, and we highlight gaps in understanding. We find that elements of PA design, management, and local and national governance challenges, species and system ecology, and sociopolitical context can all influence outcomes. Adjusting PA management to focus on actions and policies that influence the key drivers identified here could improve global biodiversity outcomes

International funding agencies: potential leaders of impact evaluation in protected areas?

Globally, protected areas are the most commonly used tools to halt biodiversity loss. Yet, some are failing to adequately conserve the biodiversity they contain. There is an urgent need for knowledge on how to make them function more effectively. Impact evaluation methods provide a set of tools that could yield this knowledge. However, rigorous outcome-focused impact evaluation is not yet used as extensively as it could be in protected area management. We examine the role of international protected area funding agencies in facilitating the use of impact evaluation. These agencies are influential stakeholders as they allocate hundreds of millions of dollars annually to support protected areas, creating a unique opportunity to shape how the conservation funds are spent globally. We identify key barriers to the use of impact evaluation, detail how large funders are uniquely placed to overcome many of these, and highlight the potential benefits if impact evaluation is used more extensively