Global Ecology and Conservation (Aug 2024)
Little progress in ecoregion representation in the last decade of terrestrial and marine protected area expansion leaves substantial tasks ahead
Abstract
Adequate representation of biodiversity in protected area networks is a prerequisite for successful conservation. Aichi Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity called for 17 % of land area and 10 % of marine area to be conserved in ecologically representative protected areas by 2020.We assess progress in protecting terrestrial and marine ecoregions for the decade 2011–2020, when the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 was in effect. Using spatial analyses and the mean target achievement metric, which indicates the degree to which a given representation target has been achieved, we analyze protected area coverage in nine countries from all continents, with a total of 173 terrestrial and 64 marine ecoregions.Results show that there is little evidence that the countries studied have strategically protected underrepresented ecoregions in the 2011–2020 decade. Although 170.000 km² of terrestrial and 3 million km² of marine reserves have been designated during this period in the nine countries investigated, about half of their terrestrial and marine ecoregions remain poorly protected in 2020.Our findings reinforce that targeted action is needed to adequately protect ecoregions in order for the new Kunming-Montreal target 3 to be more successful than Aichi target 11. The methodology presented allows for ongoing evaluation, identification of gaps, and monitoring of countries’ progress towards global and national targets for ecological representation and is applicable to any biodiversity surrogate beyond ecoregions and any country or region of interest.
