Conservation Status Index (CSI): tracking progress towards Target 3 of the UN Global Biodiversity Framework

Aerial view of Lake Brienz, Switzerland. Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn, Creative Commons, 2017

At the 15th Conference of Parties of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), 196 national governments made a major leap forward by agreeing to 23 targets to better protect, conserve, and restore nature under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The central area-based target within the agreement, Target 3, includes the protection and conservation of 30% of lands and oceans globally by 2030 (30x30). Contrary to popular understanding, the 30x30 goal does not obligate countries to achieve a minimum conservation target of 30% (or any amount).

Every country can decide the extent of areas, if any, to be added to the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), the central repository of government-submitted GIS files documenting the extent of terrestrial and marine areas — designated either as Protected Areas (PAs) or Other Effective Conservation Measures (OECMs). The WDPA can be accessed by the public via the Protected Planet web application, with most polygons labeled by governance type and management category along with summary statistics on total area extents. It is not within the mandate of the WDPA to determine the current condition of new and existing protected areas or whether the funding and governance is in place to effectively conserve these areas over the long term.

Given the voluntary nature of GBF pledges, and the fact that there is currently no incentive, financial or otherwise, for governments to expand their protected area networks, it is vitally important for civil society and other Non-state actors to have an agreed method to track the relative progress of jurisdictions towards achieving this overarching spatial target. The method would need to factor in an objective, periodic stocktake of “.. areas of particular importance for biodiversity and its contributions to people”, referred to here as Areas of Importance for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (AIBES), and the extent to which those areas are under conservation management. This method would aid civil society and other non-State actors to push for greater conservation efforts within specific jurisdictions.

While the parties to the GBF consist only of national governments, in many countries, for example Argentina and Canada, subnational decision makers have great autonomy over decisions pertaining to land use and natural resources. Thus an effective method to rank the performance of jurisdictions relative to the overarching 30x30 goal must be able to index subnational (State/Province) jurisdictions as well as national governments, factoring in the extent of AIBES within each jurisdiction that are protected/conserved. It should also be able to incorporate areas conserved through traditional land stewardship by Indigenous Peoples, as it has been estimated that at least 37% of AIBES are covered by IP territories.

To date no such index has been developed, nor has there been a peer-reviewed assessment of existing indexes that could be relevant for tracking progress towards Target 3 of the GBF. These include Global Safety Net v.1 (GSN1), Species Protection Index (SPI), ND-GAIN, Ecosystem Performance Index (EPI), SkyTruth 30x30 Tracker (30x30), Land Health Index (LHI), Ocean Health Index (OHI), Nature Conservation Index (NCI), and the Global Budget Approach (GBA). This paper will briefly discuss the methodologies of each of these indexes and the variables they incorporate. We then propose a novel conservation status index based on a series of simple variables that can be applied either to national or subnational jurisdictions. Finally, we compare rankings of the top 10 best and worst performing countries through a multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) comparison of existing and proposed indexing methods.

Lead researcher: Karl Burkart, Nature Data Lab
Contributing authors: Eric Dinerstein, Anup Joshi, Aleksandar Rankovic, Thomas Cosimano