Search

Human activities such as urbanization, infrastructure and agriculture are driving global biodiversity declines. In an attempt to balance economic development goals with biodiversity conservation, governments and industry apply a decision‐making framework known as the mitigation hierarchy, with a goal of achieving no net loss or net gain outcomes for biodiversity. Successful application of the mitigation hierarchy requires biodiversity assessments and spatial planning to inform the design of mitigation policies, identify priority areas for biodiversity conservation and impact avoidance, assess the biodiversity impacts of developments, and identify appropriate mitigation measures including offsetting residual impacts. However, guidance on the necessary data and assessment techniques is often lacking, especially in countries where formal mitigation policies do not exist or are in their infancy. Here, we discuss and demonstrate analyses that can help answer some key questions for formulating effective mitigation policies and applying the mitigation hierarchy. We focus on data and analyses that can inform the avoidance and offset steps in particular, and demonstrate these techniques using a case study in Mozambique. While these analyses will not replace field‐based assessments for projects, they offer rapid, low‐cost approaches to support scoping and development of mitigation policy, planning and decision‐making, especially in relatively data‐poor regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a critical defense against biodiversity loss in the world's oceans, but to realize near‐term conservation benefits, they must be established where major threats to biodiversity occur and can be mitigated. We quantified the degree to which MPA establishment has targeted stoppable threats (i.e., threats that can be abated through effectively managed MPAs alone) by combining spatially explicit marine biodiversity threat data in 2008 and 2013 and information on the location and potential of MPAs to halt threats. We calculated an impact metric to determine whether countries are protecting proportionally more high‐ or low‐threat ecoregions and compared observed values with random protected‐area allocation. We found that protection covered <2% of ecoregions in national waters with high levels of abatable threat in 2013, which is ∼59% less protection in high‐threat areas than if MPAs had been placed randomly. Relatively low‐threat ecoregions had 6.3 times more strict protection (International Union for Conservation of Nature categories I–II) than high‐threat ecoregions. Thirty‐one ecoregions had high levels of stoppable threat but very low protection, which presents opportunities for MPAs to yield more significant near‐term conservation benefits. The extent of the global MPA estate has increased, but the establishment of MPAs where they can reduce threats that are driving biodiversity loss is now urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To ensure the long-term persistence of biodiversity, conservation strategies must account for the entire range of climate change impacts. A variety of spatial prioritisation techniques have been developed to incorporate climate change. Here, we provide the first standardised review of these approaches. Using a systematic search, we analysed peer-reviewed spatial prioritisation publications (n = 46) and found that the most common approaches (n = 41, 89%) utilised forecasts of species distributions and aimed to either protect future species habitats (n = 24, 52%) or identify climate refugia to shelter species from climate change (n = 17, 37%). Other approaches (n = 17, 37%) used well-established conservation planning principles to combat climate change, aimed at broadly increasing either connectivity (n = 11, 24%) or the degree of heterogeneity of abiotic factors captured in the planning process (n = 8, 17%), with some approaches combining multiple goals. We also find a strong terrestrial focus (n = 35, 76%), and heavy geographical bias towards North America (n = 8, 17%) and Australia (n = 11, 24%). While there is an increasing trend of incorporating climate change into spatial prioritisation, we found that serious gaps in current methodologies still exist. Future research must focus on developing methodologies that allow planners to incorporate human responses to climate change and recognise that discrete climate impacts (e.g. extreme events), which are increasing in frequency and severity, must be addressed within the spatial prioritisation framework. By identifying obvious gaps and highlighting future research needs this review will help practitioners better plan for conservation action in the face of multiple threats including climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global areal protection targets have driven a dramatic expansion of the marine protected area (MPA) estate. We analyzed how cost‐effective global MPA expansion has been since the inception of the first global target (set in 1982) in achieving ecoregional representation. By comparing spatial patterns of MPA expansion against optimal MPA estates using the same expansion rates, we show the current MPA estate is both expensive and ineffective. Although the number of ecoregions represented tripled and 12.7% of national waters was protected, 61% of ecoregions and 81% of countries are not 10% protected. Only 10.3% of the national waters of the world would be sufficient to protect 10% of each ecoregion if MPA growth since 1982 strategically targeted underrepresented ecoregions. Unfortunately 16.3% of national waters are required for the same representative target if systematic protection started in 2016 (an extra 3.6% on top of 12.7%). To avoid the high costs of adjusting increasingly biased MPA systems, future efforts should embrace target‐driven systematic conservation planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]