Species Protection Report released at COP16 finds half of global species protection targets met
The first annual Species Protection Report assessing the progress of species conservation through protected areas was released last week by the Map of Life (MOL) and its partners at COP16 in Colombia. The report focuses on insights derived from the Species Protection Index (SPI), one of three biodiversity metrics produced and maintained by MOL that have been adopted as indicators to measure global conservation progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The SPI assesses how adequately species’ habitats are represented within protected area networks.
According to the 2024 findings, global documented protected area networks are about halfway toward meeting the protection goals for terrestrial land vertebrates and about 60% of the way toward meeting those goals for marine fish and mammals. In the past ten years, the addition of 2% of the total land area to the global protected area network has increased terrestrial SPI by 4 points, while an additional 4% of total ocean area gaining protection has increased marine SPI by 17 points.
“In the GBF’s ‘30 by 30’ target, countries worldwide have committed to rapidly grow the protected area network,” says Dr. Walter Jetz, the Principal Investigator of MOL and the Jack and Laura Dangermond Scientific Chair of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, and a professor of ecology at Yale University. The SPI has been formally recognized as a component indicator for measuring progress towards Target 3, or 30 by 30. “Our assessment brings biodiversity back into conversations that have focused on area rather than actual outcomes for species. We find that some countries have managed to deliver substantial benefits for biodiversity by an ecologically informed prioritization of conservation actions.”
As the report highlights, these changes in the SPI have occurred disparately across regions, countries, taxonomic groups, and species. On land, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand all boast a regional SPI greater than 50, while in the seas, Micronesia, Melanesia, Eastern Asia, and Western, Southern, and Northern Europe have achieved the same. This progress has not been felt evenly by all taxonomic groups – while terrestrial mammals, birds, and marine mammals soar above the averages, amphibians, reptiles, and marine fish are lagging farther behind. At the country level, huge progress has been made in several countries while many others have remained stagnant in recent years. Some of these increases are thanks to newly designated national protected areas while others are due to national recognition of other effective area-based conservation measures, or OECMs, which include many areas where Indigenous peoples rightful sovereignty over their lands are formally recognized.
The SPI measures progress in area-based conservation not simply based on the amount of area gaining protection, but how well that area represents species’ habitats. For each species included in the SPI – which, for the 2024 edition, includes terrestrial vertebrates and marine fish and mammals, with trees and other taxa being added in the near future – MOL sets a target percent of protection coverage over that species' habitat, which is 100% if the species’ habitat is very small or 15% if the species’ habitat is widespread. When that target is met, the species gets a score of 100, and the average of all species’ scores across a country or other geographic area gives the SPI.
The new Species Protection Report highlights both countries that have achieved substantial SPI increases overall and those with the greatest increases in SPI relative to the additional area protected. In fact, one facet of the SPI as a conservation decision-support tool is to highlight those areas in each country that, if included in protected area networks, would achieve the greatest progress for species protection with the smallest amount of land. This information Global Priority map can be explored on the Half-Earth Project Map.
Reflecting a core mission of MOL to provide best possible global information on species’ geographic distributions, the SPI is a rigorously calculated, species-level metric that quantitatively addresses individual species protection. In fact, the SPI is the only indicator for Target 3 that directly and quantitatively addresses the importance protected areas play for conserving species, making it a valuable tool for highlighting the exact species and areas contributing to SPI increases around the globe, as well as opportunities for future progress towards 30 by 30.
The Species Protection Report was developed in collaboration with the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s Half-Earth Project, GEO BON, Esri, Google, and other partners. The full report, along with detailed country- and species-level protection results, can be found at mol.org/indicators/protection.
Cover photo caption: Loveridge’s Forest Frog, Probrevieps loveridgei, is one of the species featured in the report. In the past ten years, this species’ protection score has increased from 5 to 97, a huge increase driven in large part by the upgrading of the status of Uzungwa Scarp, which harbors most of this species’ habitat, to Nature Reserve by the Tanzanian government. Since 2014, Tanzania’s SPI has increased by nearly 16 points. Credit: © Lorenzo Vinciguerra
