Developing a sampled global protected area coverage metric

Protected areas (PAs) are a key component of national conservation strategies. This is why signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity have committed to increase global PA coverage to 17% of the terrestrial realm by 2020. The current approach for measuring progress towards this target depends on each country’s conservation agency providing the relevant information. However, some of these data are out-of-date and they also tend not to include details of privately- or communally-managed PAs. This project aims to overcome this problem by adopting a sampled approach to data collection, producing a more accurate measure of global terrestrial PA coverage for the benefit of conservation policy-makers.

Background
IUCN and UNEP established the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) in 1981 to collate PA data provided by each country’s statutory conservation agency. However, many of these agencies lack the funding and capacity to update their information regularly and they also tend to focus on state PAs. Thus some national PAs are not accurately mapped or are missing key accompanying information, while a majority of the data on privately- or communally-owned PAs are absent despite the significant conservation role they play in some countries. This means we currently lack an accurate metric of global PA coverage.

This project will overcome these limitations by creating a metric based on a subset of countries that represent global patterns in terms of biodiversity, PA governance and socio-economic factors. This will then let us focus resources on collecting high quality data from a smaller number of countries, and let us engage with a broader range of relevant organisations instead of relying entirely on over-stretched government agencies.  The first step is selecting this sample of countries, so we will use a systematic conservation planning approach to identify the representative set of nations. This will involve collecting biodiversity, socio-economic and policy data for each country and then using the Marxan conservation planning software to identify candidate countries.