Potential contribution of OECMs to international area-based conservation targets in a biodiversity rich country, Spain

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Highlights

  • Spain’s progress toward 2020, 2030 & ecological global targets was evaluated.

  • Two scenarios considering protected areas (PAs) and OECMs were developed.

  • Spain meets 2020 targets and is likely to meet 2030 targets just with PAs.

  • River reserves, Public Utility Forests and Geoparks outstood as potential OECMs.

  • OECMs would notably enhance Spain’s area-based conservation performance.

Abstract

Other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) are new conservation tools intended to complement protected areas (PAs) at achieving effective biodiversity conservation and meeting international area-based targets. However, OECMs have been rarely considered in practical terms until recently. Here, we performed a rapid evaluation on the degree of fulfilment of current area-based international biodiversity targets, post-2020 foreseeable oncoming targets, and ecological targets by considering: 1) Protection coverage; 2) Inclusiveness of important areas for biodiversity; 3) Protection management; 4) Connectivity; and 5) Habitat representation, on land and at sea in Spain, a Euro-Mediterranean, biodiversity rich country. We conducted the evaluation under two scenarios: 1) Scenario 1 considers designated PAs; and 2) Scenario 2, that also includes potential OECMs. In order to generate Scenario 2, thirteen legal categories were assessed against international guidance on OECMs as a first step to screen their likelihood of providing OECMs in Spain. Our findings show that some potentially satisfactory OECM categories such as Public Utility Forests, River Reserves or Geoparks meet the OECM criteria to a large degree and deserve further study. Our results also highlight that Spain is currently well above most foreseeable post-2020 biodiversity targets and even close to some ecological targets using just PAs, except for marine protected area (MPA) management and MPA offshore coverage. Adding OECMs would noticeably improve the country’s figures yet without reaching many exigent ecological targets. OECMs can become a useful, cost-effective biodiversity conservation tool that contributes to international targets under new, more ambitious area-based conservation requirements in Spain and elsewhere. Nevertheless, for this to happen, suitable biodiversity management and monitoring schemes must be ensured.

Introduction

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 that included the Aichi Targets (ATs) in 2010 in recognition that human activities were pushing plenty of species to the edge of extinction (CBD, 2010). AT11 stated that ‘by 2020, at least 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscapes and seascapes’. At that time it was noted that, despite the remarkable increase in the number and coverage of protected areas (PAs) worldwide, global biodiversity was showing steady declines (Butchart, Walpole, Collen, & van Strien, 2010). Ten years later, global protected area (PA) and marine protected area (MPA) coverage have notably expanded from 14.0 %–15.1 % in the terrestrial realm and from 6.5 %–17.8 % in the marine realm (up to 200 nm), respectively (UNEP-WCMC & IUCN, 2016; UNEP-WCMC & IUCN, 2021a). However, despite those increases, biodiversity trends are not improving (IPBES, 2019), showing the need for more effective conservation actions (Dudley, Jonas, Nelson, & Parrish, 2018; Noss, Dobson, Baldwin, & Beiber, 2012).

A number of studies have assessed how well different countries or regions are meeting the requirements of AT11 using exclusively PAs (UNEP-WCMC, IUCN & NGS, 2018; Bacon, Gannon, Stephen, & Seyoum-Edjigu, 2019; Gannon, Dubois, Dudley, & Ervin, 2019). Until recently, OECMs have gone largely unnoticed, although there is a growing body of literature considering such areas implicitly (Ervin, Mulongoy, Lawrence, & Game, 2010) and explicitly (Jonas, Enns, Jonas, & Lee, 2017; Butchart, Clarke, Smith, & Sykes, 2015; Diz, Johnson, Riddell, & Rees, 2018; Dudley et al., 2018; Jonas, Barbuto, Jonas, & Kothari, 2014; Laffoley, Dudley, Jonas, & MacKinnon, 2017; Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Rodríguez, Abdul Malak, & Nastasi, 2016). The fact that an official definition for OECMs was only adopted in 2018 most likely deterred scientists, managers and decision-makers from considering such conservation tool further (Jonas, MacKinnon, Dudley, & Hockings, 2018). An OECM is defined by Parties to the CBD as: ‘A geographically defined area other than a Protected Area, which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity, with associated ecosystem functions and services and where applicable, cultural, spiritual, socio–economic, and other locally relevant values’ (CBD, 2018). Since 2018, efforts have been made to develop guidance on recognising and reporting OECMs (IUCN-WCPA, 2019) and a draft site-level methodology for identifying OECMs (Marnewick, Stevens, & Jonas, 2020). Contracting Parties to the CBD are currently discussing new post-2020 biodiversity targets for the oncoming decade (CBD, 2020a). OECMs are envisaged to play a significant role in contributing to effective biodiversity conservation and in enabling countries to meet new policy targets (IUCN-WCPA, 2019).

The Mediterranean basin is recognized as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, where high degrees of endemicity coexist with high rates of transformation of natural and semi-natural habitats (Myers, Mittermeier, Mittermeier, da Fonseca, & Kent, 2000; Olson & Dinerstein, 2002). Thus, it is of the utmost importance to effectively conserve such habitats. Spain is a biodiversity rich, Euro-Mediterranean country. It hosts 55 % of all natural habitat types of Community interest in the European Union and 59 % of all the species of Community interest in the Habitats Directive (EEC, European Economic Community, 1992; European Commission & EEA & European Environment Agency, 2021). It has the largest numbers of plant species of all European or Mediterranean countries with over 8,000 species and an endemicity rate of around 23 % (CBD, 2021). Like other Mediterranean countries, Spain has experienced extensive habitat transformation in the past few decades leading to largely unfavourable conservation status of biodiversity and ecosystem services (Montes, Benayas, & Santos, 2011) despite its large PA coverage (European Commission & EEA & European Environment Agency, 2021). Thus, concern exists that current PA schemes might not suffice to effectively conserve biodiversity in the country in the long term (Rodríguez-Rodríguez & Martínez-Vega, 2018a). Consequently, whereas enhanced protection of existing PAs is suggested (Martínez-Fernández, Ruiz-Benito, & Zavala, 2015; Rodríguez-Rodríguez & Martínez-Vega, 2018a), wider landscape-scale measures are also needed to revert negative biodiversity figures in the country (Montes et al., 2011). As a result, the Spanish Government recently approved a national Strategy on Green Infrastructure, Connectivity and Ecological Restoration (Spanish Government, 2020) in which natural and semi-natural areas outside PAs are likely to play a crucial role. Proper identification, selection and recognition of such areas can become a useful part of the Strategy by complementing and connecting PAs, recognising conservation outcomes and efforts outside PAs, streamlining ecological functionality of the wider countryside, and engaging territorial stakeholders.

Here, we performed a rapid evaluation of the degree to which Spain is meeting current international area-based biodiversity conservation targets, namely AT11 (CBD, 2010). We also evaluated how close the country would be to meeting foreseeable post-2020 targets for 2030 (CBD, 2020a) and desirable ecological targets (Dudley et al., 2018; Noss et al., 2012; Wilson, 2016) in the terrestrial and marine realms under two scenarios that progressively consider PAs and potential OECMs.

Section snippets

Study area

The study area (Fig. 1) includes the land area (505,756 km2) and marine area of Spain, including its territorial sea area (up to 12 nm; roughly 118,650 km2; Marineregions, 2019) and hypothetical Exclusive Economic Zone (up to 200 nm; approximately 889,530 km2; Marineregions, 2019), as no Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) have been established in the Mediterranean Sea yet.

Scenarios

Two additive scenarios were developed for this rapid evaluation:

a) Scenario 1: Designated PAs. All PAs designated until January

Potential OECM categories

226,686 potential sites pertaining to 13 legal or managerial territorial categories were assessed as potential OECMs. A number of the reviewed categories met most international OECM criteria and could provide good candidate sites to be recognised as OECMs: Public Utility Forests, River Reserves and Geoparks (Table 2). Hunting Reserves, a sub-category of Hunting Areas where hunting is restricted or forbidden on nature conservation grounds, might also provide some useful candidate sites, but this

Area-based target figures in Spain

In early 2021, Spain’s (M)PA network exceeded international protection targets for 2020 (AT11; CBD, 2010). Spain would also readily meet most foreseeable post-2020 targets with the exception of offshore MPA coverage and management. The Spanish (M)PA network is actually very close to meeting some ecological targets regarding inclusiveness of IABs (at sea) and terrestrial and inshore connectivity. Thus, the country is likely to successfully meet new area-based targets for 2030 (CBD, 2020a) with

Conclusions

Spain has been successful at meeting the area-based 2020 targets evaluated here using PAs, and is likely to meet foreseeable post-2020 targets with some more effort on (M)PA management, MPA offshore coverage and, most likely, legal stringency. However, high policy compliance seems not enough to warrant effective biodiversity conservation in the face of disappointing national and global conservation figures. Thus, in addition to ensuring effective management and monitoring schemes inside (M)PAs,

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This paper recognizes contributions through the ‘sequence-determines-credit’ approach. DRR and ASE contributed equally. We would like to acknowledge two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to enhance the quality of the manuscript. This study was funded by the University of Malaga through its Research Plan.

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