DCAs: documenting the full extent of local community and private conservation areas

Members of the Kofan Guardia/Land Patrol of Sinangoe mapping ancestral Kofan Territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Courtesy of Amazon Frontlines.

The full extent of the global conservation estate is unknown. The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA aka ‘Protected Planet’), managed by UNEP and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, is the central repository of Protected Areas (PAs) and Other Effective Conservation Measures (OECMs) listed by national governments under the auspices of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). In total, the database aggregates over 300,000 polygons covering roughly 18% of the world’s lands and inland waters, but this only gives us part of the picture.

There are many other areas under some form of conservation management that do not appear in the WDPA. Coined “Documented Conservation Areas” (DCAs), these include parks managed by subnational jurisdictions and municipalities, Indigenous tribal government lands, private lands with conservation easements, or community conservation projects led/co-led by NGOs. Some of these areas may have been proposed by governments but not yet accepted into the database. Others are protected areas that were formerly listed in the WDPA but subsequently removed by governments for political reasons. And many, many more conservation areas – either privately held lands or community/NGO governed lands – have never been registered.

It's vitally important to put local-level conservation on the map, and this is the central goal of Nature Data Lab’s Conservation Justice program. DCAs often provide habitats for threatened species and key ecosystem services, and in many cases they surpass the conservation outcomes of formal government-managed PAs. Yet often these areas are critically underfunded and at-risk of development due to a lack of visibility. Putting local-level conservation on the map will not only help to drive more financial resources to local communities most in need, but it will create a more complete picture of conservation globally, providing important insights for corporates and investors keen to understand the full extent of important natural habitats that they might be impeding upon without knowing.

Aggregated from submissions by a large network of conservation organizations and researchers around the world, the open-source DCA database will be made freely available to all on the GSN3 web platform, with the goal of greatly increasing public awareness and funding flows to support these critically important nature conservation efforts. It’s also the hope that a focus on DCAs will help to drive their adoption within the WDPA registry as part of the global 30x30 goal, affording them increased protection from unwanted legal or illegal resource extraction that could threaten biodiversity and the future wellbeing of local communities.