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The warming rates in many mountain areas are higher than the global average, negatively impacting crop systems. Little is known about the climatic changes which are already being observed in eastern Democratic Republic (DR) of Congo, due to the lack of long-term meteorological data. Local perceptions could help us to understand not only the climatic changes and impacts but also which adaptation strategies are already being used by local smallholder farmers. Semi-structured questionnaires were administered to 300 smallholder Bafuliru (n = 150) and Lega (n = 150) farmers living in the Itombwe Mountains. The respondents reported climatic changes and impacts, with the Bafuliru—living on the eastern drier slopes—reporting more changes and impacts. While the Bafuliru were implementing several adaptation strategies (e.g., increased irrigation and use of inputs, more soil conservation, more income diversification), the Lega were implementing very few, due to soft limits (access to inputs, markets, and information) and culture (less interest in farming, less capacity to organize into groups). The results highlight important differences in sociocultural contexts, even for one ‘remote’ mountain, calling for a more collaborative approach to adaptation planning and action.

Aichi Target 11 (AT11) includes the commitment of 194 governments to equitably manage protected areas (PAs) by 2020. Here we evaluate whether existing PA Management Effectiveness (PAME) and social and governance assessment tools can be used to determine if AT11 meets equity goals. We find that PAME assessment conditions are insufficiently inclusive of relevant actors and do not satisfactorily allow for a diversity of perspectives to be expressed and accounted for, both of which are essential for equitable PA management. Furthermore, none of the analysed PAME tools fully cover multidimensional equity and thus they are inadequate for assessing progress towards equitable management in PAs. The available social and governance PA assessment tools stipulate more inclusive and participatory conditions within their guidelines, and the IUCN Governance Guidelines comprehensively capture equity dimensions in PA management, but results are not comparable across sites. We conclude that available assessment tools do not provide a reliable way to track equity in PAs at global scale. The IUCN Governance Guidelines could be adjusted to achieve this goal, providing that the information collected is made globally comparable, while ensuring transparency, accountability and room for contestation, including by communities whose livelihoods are directly implicated. Ultimately, developing and deploying globally comparable measures to evaluate equity is problematic, as the process of gathering comparable data inevitably obscures information that is highly relevant to resolving equity issues at local scales. This challenge must be met, however, if nations are to achieve and report on their success at meeting AT11 by 2020.

It is widely recognized in science, policy, and practice that protected areas (PAs) that are equitably and effectively managed are essential for halting biodiversity loss. However, our understanding of the relationships between management effectiveness and equity remains weak. Here, we investigate potential synergies and trade-offs between management and equity as well as how they can work together to reduce human pressure in PAs. We then examine the potential of existing global datasets on effectiveness, equity, and human pressure to help inform international policy processes. Our preliminary findings show a negative association between well-defined and sound managed PAs and how satisfied are local people about the decisions related to the management of the PA, reinforcing study of cases that found conflicts in top-down established and managed PAs. We find, however, no association between management effectiveness and social equity with an increasing human pressure. We find only a limited overlap in global databases on management effectiveness, social equity, and human pressure (n = 33). Thus, our results highlight the need to increase the number of PAs with appropriate data about management effectiveness, equity and human pressure to inform policy processes. Without such data, it will be difficult to suggest in honest new quantitative targets for the quality of PAs and Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures post-2020. We would like to thank Mike Mascia and Neil Burgess for useful discussions in early stages of the manuscript. This work is funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 program under the MSCA grant agreement no. 659881 to NZ-C and no. 676108 to JG; as well as VILLUM FONDEN ( VKR023371 ) to JG.

Understanding the spatial distribution of elephant carcasses in relation to ecological characteristics and human activities is critical to developing targeted management strategies for reducing poaching. We employ a spatial modelling approach to quantify the relative contribution of multiple climatic, ecological, human and protected area management predictors of the number of elephant carcasses in a recognized poaching hotspot: the Ruvuma landscape of northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania. This includes the Niassa Reserve in the south and the Selous Game Reserve in the north. In Mozambique, the number of elephant carcasses is positively associated with State-managed protected areas such as Niassa Reserve, but particularly with environmental variables including low rainfall and high temperatures. In Tanzania, elephant carcasses are positively associated with community-managed sites. A strong focus on effective management of protected areas in the Ruvuma landscape is crucial to reducing the killing of elephants., This work builds partially on the research project ‘Poverty and ecosystem Impacts of Tanzania’s wildlife Management Areas’ (“PIMA”), funded by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme (NE/L00139X/1), itself funded by UK’s Department for International Development, Economic and Social Research Council and Natural Environment Research Council. N.Z-C. and N.B. acknowledge the Danish National Research Foundation for funding for the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate; grant number DNRF96.

Aichi Target 11 (AT11), adopted by 193 Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2010, states that protected areas (PAs) must be equitably managed by 2020. However, significant challenges remain in terms of actual implementation of equitable management in PAs. These challenges include, among others, the lack of a standardized approach to assess and monitor social equity and the difficulty of reducing social equity to a series of metrics. This perspective addresses these challenges and it proposes a minimum set of ten indicators for assessing and monitoring the three dimensions of social equity in protected areas: recognition, procedure and distribution. The indicators target information on social equity regarding cultural identity, statutory and customary rights, knowledge diversity; free, prior and informed consent mechanisms, full participation and transparency in decision-making, access to justice, accountability over decisions, distribution of conservation burdens, and sharing of conservation benefits. The proposed indicator system is a first step in advancing an approach to facilitate our understanding of how the different dimensions of social equity are denied or recognized in PAs globally. The proposed system would be used by practitioners to mainstream social equity indicators in PAs assessments at the site level and to report to the CBD on the ‘equitably managed’ element of AT11.

The knowledge of the spatial patterns of species richness and, particularly, of endemic and threatened species at the scale at which management activities take place is crucial for conservation. Yet, detailed descriptions of species’ distribution areas are often lacking or incomplete, especially in the tropics. This article focuses on the African island of Bioko and uses species accumulation curves to evaluate the completeness of its biological inventory for three plant groups (ferns, monocotyledons and dicotyledons), birds and monkeys. Results showed that the current inventory is fairly complete for monkeys and birds, but only covers half of the vegetation in the island. Bioclimatic models were used to estimate the potential distribution of each species and to assemble species richness patterns for each taxa and for endemic and threatened species, revealing that montane and lowland rainforests were the richest habitats, while high altitude shrubs and subalpine meadows were the poorest ones. Predicted richness values for monsoon forests were unexpectedly low for plants and birds, probably because of insufficient sampling in these areas. Additionally, the comparison of species richness patterns with the proposed delineation of protected areas for the island shows that these will cover most hotspots of species richness, endemism and threatened species, except for dicotyledonous plants and endemic birds. The potential utility of the predicted patterns for conservation priorities and initiatives in Bioko is discussed.

8 páginas, 3 figuras, 1 tabla., Although the conversion of natural vegetation to agriculture threatens biodiversity, post-agricultural lands may provide an opportunity to preserve biodiversity if they are allowed to regenerate. We develop a framework for incorporating abandoned agricultural fields into the design of a Biosphere Reserve using former cocoa plantations on Bioko, Equatorial Guinea, as a case study. First, we used BIOCLIM to model the potential distribution of 62 ferns, 327 monocotyledons, 749 dicotyledons, seven primates, and 104 birds on Bioko. Next, we quantitatively assessed the representation of these distributions in conservation areas proposed by the Equatoguinean administration (hereafter “EPAs”). In addition, we used an area prioritization algorithm implemented in the ResNet software package to select an initial set of sites to serve as the Biosphere Reserve’s core areas, that is, intact forest in Bioko’s montane regions. Then, to augment the beta-diversity of the Reserve, we used the area prioritization algorithm to prioritize buffer zones in lowland sites including rainforest remnants and abandoned plantations that have partially regenerated to forest. We also compared the representation of biodiversity in the EPAs to its representation in Biosphere Reserves designed with ResNet. The representation of vegetation types and species in Reserves selected by ResNet that occupy 25% of the land on Bioko is equivalent to the representation achieved by the EPAs, which would cover 42% of Bioko. To conclude, we propose a conservation plan for Bioko., N.Z.-C. wants to thank the Spanish Agency for Development and Cooperation (AECID) for its financial support through a MAE/AECI Grant. Work by M.Á.R. was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Grant CGL2006-03000/BOS). Work by R.C., T.F., and S.S. was supported by National Science Foundation(USA) Grant SES-0645884, 2007–2009 (Principal Investigator: S.S.).