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This indicator serves as a means of measuring progress toward the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of marine ecosystems and their services.

The indicator - Coverage of protected areas in relation to marine areas shows temporal trends in the mean percentage of each important site for marine biodiversity (i.e., those that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity) that is covered by designated protected areas. The safeguard of important sites is vital for stemming the decline in biodiversity and ensuring long term and sustainable use of marine natural resources. This indicator adds meaningful information to, complements and builds from traditionally reported simple statistics of marine area covered by protected areas, computed by dividing the total protected area within a country by the total territorial area of the country and multiplying by 100 (e.g., Chape et al. 2005). Such percentage area coverage statistics do not recognise the extreme variation of biodiversity importance over space (Rodrigues et al. 2004), and so risk generating perverse outcomes through the protection of areas which are large at the expense of those which require protection.

Fisheries Department

Fisheries Department

Annual

Percentage (%)

Protected areas, as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN; Dudley 2008), are clearly defined geographical spaces, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values. Levels of access to protected areas vary among the protected area management categories. Some areas, such as scientific reserves, are maintained in their natural state and closed to any other use. Others are used for recreation or tourism, or even open for the sustainable extraction of natural resources. In addition to protecting biodiversity, protected areas have high social and economic value: supporting local livelihoods; maintaining fisheries; harbouring an untold wealth of genetic resources; supporting thriving recreation and tourism industries; providing for science, research and education; and forming a basis for cultural and other non-material values.

Protected areas, as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN; Dudley 2008), are clearly defined geographical spaces, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values. Importantly, a variety of specific management objectives are recognised within this definition, spanning conservation, restoration, and sustainable use:

• Category Ia: Strict nature reserve
• Category Ib: Wilderness area
• Category II: National park
• Category III: Natural monument or feature
• Category IV: Habitat/species management area
• Category V: Protected landscape/seascape
• Category VI: Protected area with sustainable use of natural resources

The status "designated" is attributed to a protected area when the corresponding authority, according to national legislation or common practice (e.g., by means of an executive decree or the like), officially endorses a document of designation. The designation must be made for the purpose of biodiversity conservation, not de facto protection arising because of some other activity (e.g., military).

Sites contributing significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity are identified following globally standard criteria for the identification of Key Biodiversity Areas (IUCN 2016) applied at national levels. Two variants of these standard criteria have been applied in all countries to date. The first is for the identification of Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas, that is, sites contributing significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity, identified using data on birds, of which >12,000 sites in total have been identified from all of the world’s countries (BirdLife International 2014). The second is for the identification of Alliance for Zero Extinction sites (Ricketts et al. 2005), that is, sites holding effectively the entire population of at least one species assessed as Critically Endangered or Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. In total, 587 Alliance for Zero Extinction sites have been identified for 920 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, conifers, and reef-building corals. A global standard for the identification of Key Biodiversity Areas unifying these approaches along with other mechanisms for identification of important sites for other species and ecosystems was approved by IUCN (2016).

Given that data for the global indicator are compiled at national levels, it is straightforward to disaggregate to national and regional levels, or conversely to aggregate to the global level.

This indicator is calculated from data derived from a spatial overlap between digital polygons for protected areas from the World Database on Protected Areas (IUCN & UNEP-WCMC 2017) and digital polygons for marine Key Biodiversity Areas (from the World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas, including Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas, Alliance for Zero Extinction sites, and other Key Biodiversity Areas; available through the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool).

The indicator is used to track progress towards the 2011–2020 Strategic Plan for Biodiversity (CBD 2014, Tittensor et al. 2014), and was used as an indicator towards the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2010 Target (Butchart et al. 2010).

The indicator does not measure the effectiveness of protected areas in reducing biodiversity loss, which ultimately depends on a range of management and enforcement factors not covered by the indicator. Several initiatives are underway to address this limitation.

Quality control criteria are applied to ensure consistency and comparability of the data in the World Database on Protected Areas. New data are validated at UNEP-WCMC through several tools and translated into the standard data structure of the World Database on Protected Areas. Discrepancies between the data in the World Database on Protected Areas and new data are minimised by provision of a manual (UNEP-WCMC 2016) and resolved in communication with data provider.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.