Speaker
Description
Protected areas are one of the most important tools to preserve species and biodiversity. With limited conservation funding, expectations and demands on protected area networks are manyfold, e.g. protecting species, ensuring ecosystem functioning, or mitigating climate change. This necessitates a prioritization of conservation effort and continuous evaluation of protected area portfolios against individual targets and goals. Here, we use the case study of a large government-funded development bank to develop an approach that evaluates areas against the global biodiversity and climate goals set by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. We identify key indicators for assessing areas, and apply these to evaluation examples at three spatial levels, i.e. the biogeographical realm, the biome, and the country levels. At each spatial level, our approach evaluates how i) a portfolio of protected areas such as financed by development banks or conservation agencies and ii) an individual selected protected area contributes to these targets, by contrasting the indicators for the selected portfolio or area with indicators for a random selection of protected areas in the same realm, biome, or country. Our case study results highlight challenges in meeting diverse conservation objectives with limited numbers of protected areas, providing a basis for informed decision-making and contributing to more effective quality control in area-based conservation.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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