Effectively managed

This report has so far focused on the location and coverage of protected and conserved areas. Of equal importance is the quality of governance and management within these areas.

Several methodologies have been developed to evaluate the effectiveness of protected area management. These vary in scope and content. Most rely on self-assessment and are best suited to understanding the effectiveness of management in a specific site at a given point in time. Such assessments are less well-suited to comparisons of management effectiveness between sites, limiting the extent to which they can be aggregated into global indicators.

The management effectiveness indicator for Aichi Target 11 tracks the percentage of protected areas that have undergone management effectiveness assessments (with a target agreed by Parties in 2010 (CBD, 2010) of 60% of total area to be assessed by 2015). The Global Database on Protected Area Management Effectiveness (GD-PAME) is used to calculate this indicator.

The GD-PAME stores assessments from 169 countries, conducted using 69 different methodologies. In total, 11% of protected areas in the WDPA have been assessed. Only 15.4% of countries have met the target of assessing management effectiveness across 60% of their protected lands and waters. Globally, management effectiveness assessments have been conducted across only 18.29% of the area covered by protected areas.

The clear limitation of this indicator is that it does not reveal how effectively the world’s protected areas are managed; it simply illustrates where assessments have been carried out. Efforts to develop a more meaningful global measure of effectiveness have been hindered by a number of challenges: many countries do not have sufficient resources to monitor effectiveness, or established mechanisms to report results; willingness to report can be limited by political sensitivities (e.g. a concern that poor performance will result in the withdrawal of funding); and it is challenging to develop methodologies that are suitable for global-level reporting while also being flexible enough to adapt to local conditions and capacities (Geldmann et al., 2021).

Insights can be found among Natural World Heritage sites, which make up around 8% of the area covered by protected areas globally, and are consistently assessed through the IUCN World Heritage Outlook (IUCN, 2020). Tracking the conservation prospects of these sites since 2014, this indicator helps to measure the success of protected and conserved areas in retaining their values, with World Heritage serving as a litmus test. Its conclusions are sobering: more sites have deteriorated than have improved since 2017; threats to their values continue to escalate, with climate change now the most significant; and only half of the sites have effective protection and management. Critical aspects such as sustainable financing, law enforcement and staffing remain of serious concern, reinforcing the need for adequate resources to effectively manage protected areas. However, the majority of sites assessed (63%) still have a positive conservation outlook. The successes of these World Heritage sites, as detailed in the IUCN Outlook, can help to inform and scale up positive outcomes after 2020 for all protected and conserved areas.

Furthermore, the IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas has an important future role to play as the global standard for effective and equitable governance and management (IUCN and WCPA, 2017). Beyond providing a standard for management effectiveness, the Green List links management to governance and successful conservation outcomes – elements that have been lacking from indicators on the effectiveness of the world’s conservation network. As the number of jurisdictions and sites committed to applying the IUCN Green List Standard increases, it may become a powerful tool to assess protected and conserved area performance, including quality metrics, into the future. Box 9 further considers the future evolution of management effectiveness assessments.