Shortfalls and Solutions for Meeting National and Global Conservation Area Targets

Governments have committed to conserving17% of terrestrial and10%of marine environments globally, especially “areas of particular importance forbiodiversity” through “ecologically representative” Protected Area (PA) sys-tems or other “area-based conservation measures”, while individual countrieshave committed to conserve 3–50% of their land area. We estimate that PAscurrently cover 14.6% of terrestrial and 2.8% of marine extent, but 59–68%of ecoregions, 77–78% of important sites for biodiversity, and 57% of 25,380species have inadequate coverage. The existing 19.7 million km2terrestrialPA network needs only 3.3 million km2to be added to achieve 17% terres-trial coverage. However, it would require nearly doubling to achieve, cost-efficiently, coverage targets for all countries, ecoregions, important sites, andspecies. Poorer countries have the largest relative shortfalls. Such extensiveand rapid expansion of formal PAs is unlikely to be achievable. Greater fo-cus is therefore needed on alternative approaches, including community- andprivately managed sites and other effective area-based conservation measures.