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Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) promotes the sustainable human activities development and uses in the marine space, playing a role in their effective management. The enhancement of connectivity is crucial for the conservation of biodiversity and landscape planning. Ecological Corridors (ECs) are an important type of connectivity for biodiversity conservation in fragmented habitats. The EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 includes ECs into the network of protected areas and allows for the creation of additional protected areas. MSP studies considering ECs remain still lacking, especially for the design of networks between Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs). In this paper, knowledge, and tools for investigating marine ECs were reviewed, with a systematic bibliometric analysis to summarize the current scientific research. Previous studies integrating ecological connectivity into planning for marine conservation have focused on models of larval dispersal, adult movements, and dispersal of single species by using benthic habitat proxies. Few studies were found on ECs in marine environments: in the coral Caribbean reef systems in the Gulf of Mexico; within benthic habitats along the Pacific coast of Canada; between MPAs in British Columbia (Canada); and by analyzing migratory species in the Yangtze estuary (China). Commonly used approaches to project and map ECs in marine environments are least-cost and circuit theories allowing to incorporate movement with cost or resistance to movement, depending on species and preferred habitats. The systematic bibliometric analysis returned 25 studies, most of which were from North America (40%) and European countries (36%) and the largest share of papers (68%) from 2018 to 2022. This review pinpointed the need of integrating different disciplines to investigate connectivity and the need by policymakers and practitioners to recognize the importance of ecological connectivity, even there are significant challenges for integrating connectivity into policies, planning, and conservation.

Area-based approaches are a central component of global efforts to conserve biodiversity. While the focus of many countries has been mainly on protected areas, other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMS) have been accorded global recognition in the past decade as a vital complementary approach to protected areas. This recognition has been reemphasised in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022, with its Target 3 ratchetting up area-based coverage targets to 30 per cent by 2030. A growing focus and reliance on OECMs to contribute towards achieving this target is anticipated. The international community has in the past few years introduced some guidance to identify, secure, manage, monitor and verify the anticipated long-term biodiversity conservation outcomes of OECMs. Some commentators have argued for domestic legal intervention to complement this general international guidance. The South African Government has recognised the potential contribution of OECMs towards the achievement of domestic and global area-based biodiversity targets in its National Protected Areas Expansion Strategy (2018) but has alluded to the need for legal intervention to ensure that they achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity. Some domestic commentators have highlighted the strong link between biodiversity stewardship (particularly conservation areas) and OECMs, advocating that these conservation areas should form the priority focus of domestic efforts to identify OECMs. This article scopes this potential link and specifically considers whether the current domestic legal and policy framework applicable to these conservation areas is sufficiently robust to ensure that only appropriate areas are identified as OECMs and that once recognised, they are governed and effectively managed in the long term. It highlights several frailties of the existing framework and drawing from anticipated legal reform in the Western Cape relating to biodiversity stewardship, it proposes a possible model for future national legislation regulating OECMs.

Rural commons in East-Africa have historically played key socio-economic and environmental sustainability. Despite growing interest in this arena, there are still surprisingly few studies that examine rural customary management of pastoral communities in East Africa. This is striking given that this region is an exemplary area for pastoralism and thus ideal for communal systems such as commons. Deficient studies and political support in this area could be linked to widespread prejudice of branding pastoralism as perilous to the environment. We set out to conduct a study to examine and test pastoralists' customary norms that underpin environmental sustainability/unsustainabity of pastoral commons focusing on Mwanda-Marungu, in Taita hills, Kenya where the first author originates and brought up as a pastoralist up to the age of 24. Through ethnographic approaches and semi-open interviews to 193 respondents conducted in 2019–2021 during water and pasture stress during the dry months of July–October, we examined whether customary governance of Mwanda-Marungu would offer sustainable model that conforms to the IUCN's Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures (OECMs). Our study showed that pastoral communities in this area have been developing inventive measures for generations that improve good management and ecological protection. These may be tied to the principles of OECMs which contests the misconception about pastoralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Area-based approaches are a central component of global efforts to conserve biodiversity. While the focus of many countries has been mainly on protected areas, other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMS) have been accorded global recognition in the past decade as a vital complementary approach to protected areas. This recognition has been reemphasised in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022, with its Target 3 ratchetting up area-based coverage targets to 30 per cent by 2030. A growing focus and reliance on OECMs to contribute towards achieving this target is anticipated. The international community has in the past few years introduced some guidance to identify, secure, manage, monitor and verify the anticipated long-term biodiversity conservation outcomes of OECMs. Some commentators have argued for domestic legal intervention to complement this general international guidance. The South African Government has recognised the potential contribution of OECMs towards the achievement of domestic and global area-based biodiversity targets in its National Protected Areas Expansion Strategy (2018) but has alluded to the need for legal intervention to ensure that they achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity. Some domestic commentators have highlighted the strong link between biodiversity stewardship (particularly conservation areas) and OECMs, advocating that these conservation areas should form the priority focus of domestic efforts to identify OECMs. This article scopes this potential link and specifically considers whether the current domestic legal and policy framework applicable to these conservation areas is sufficiently robust to ensure that only appropriate areas are identified as OECMs and that once recognised, they are governed and effectively managed in the long term. It highlights several frailties of the existing framework and drawing from anticipated legal reform in the Western Cape relating to biodiversity stewardship, it proposes a possible model for future national legislation regulating OECMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A renewed global agenda to address biodiversity loss was sanctioned by adoption of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets in 2010 by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. However, Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 contained a significant policy and reporting challenge, conceding that both protected areas (PAs) and 'other effective area-based conservation measures' (OEABCMs) could be used to meet national targets of protecting 17 and 10 % of terrestrial and marine areas, respectively. We report on a consensus-based approach used to (1) operationalize OEABCMs in the Canadian context and (2) develop a decision-screening tool to assess sites for inclusion in Canada's Aichi Target 11 commitment. Participants in workshops determined that for OEABCMs to be effective, they must share a core set of traits with PAs, consistent with the intent of Target 11. (1) Criteria for inclusion of OEABCMs in the Target 11 commitment should be consistent with the overall intent of PAs, with the exception that they may be governed by regimes not previously recognized by reporting agencies. (2) These areas should have an expressed objective to conserve nature, be long-term, generate effective nature conservation outcomes, and have governance regimes that ensure effective management. A decision-screening tool was developed that can reduce the risk that areas with limited conservation value are included in national accounting. The findings are relevant to jurisdictions where the debate on what can count is distracting Parties to the Convention from reaching conservation goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected areas (PAs) are considered as a globally accepted strategy for biodiversity conservation that demonstrates the difficulties in meeting the proposed objectives; therefore, different conservation schemes are promoted to integrate the design of interfaces that favor the exchange of knowledge among different sectors, systems and stakeholders. The objective of this study was to characterize challenges regarding the protection of natural protected areas and other biodiversity conservation schemes in Tamaulipas, Mexico. This paper analyzed 39 areas with some form of protection status in addition to the 70 national and international designations that are part of them. A document review and 13 semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts from the public, private, academic, and civil society sectors. The data were analyzed from a qualitative perspective using ATLAS.ti 9 software. The results show the overlapping of protection schemes in priority areas; the lack of policies and mechanisms that integrate the different schemes to facilitate the exchange between stakeholders; and regulatory, structural, governance, management, participation, and operational gaps, as well as the absence of comprehensive and long-term work. The importance of and challenges in articulating the different schemes and visions to achieve effective biodiversity conservation are evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]