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This indicator adds meaningful information to, complements and builds from traditionally reported simple statistics of the terrestrial and freshwater areas covered by protected areas. 
 

This indicator Proportion of important sites for terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity that are covered by protected areas shows temporal trends in the mean percentage of each important site for terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity (i.e., those that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity) that is covered by designated protected areas.
 

Forest Department
 

Forest Department
 

Annual

Percentage (%)
 

Rationale

The safeguard of important sites is vital for stemming the decline in biodiversity and ensuring long term and sustainable use of terrestrial and freshwater natural resources. The establishment of protected areas is an important mechanism for achieving this aim, and this indicator serves as a means of measuring progress toward the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and their services, in particular forests, wetlands, mountains, and drylands, in line with obligations under international agreements. Importantly, while it can be disaggregated to report on any given single ecosystem of interest (e.g., forests), it is not restricted to any single ecosystem type, and so faithfully reflects the intent of SDG target 15.1. 

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; protecting watersheds from erosion; harboring 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. 

This indicator is computed by dividing the total protected area within a country by the total territorial area of the country and multiplying by 100. Such percentage area coverage statistics do not recognize 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. 
 

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 recognized 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 has 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).
 

is by ecosystem type. 
 

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 terrestrial and freshwater 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 value of the indicator at a given point in time, based on data on the year of protected area establishment recorded in the World Database on Protected Areas, is computed as the mean percentage of each Key Biodiversity Area currently recognized that it covered by protected areas. 

Year of protected area establishment is unknown for 12% of protected areas in the World Database on Protected Areas, generating uncertainty around changing protected area coverage over time. To reflect this uncertainty, a year was randomly assigned from another protected area within the same country, and then this procedure repeated 1,000 times, with the median plotted. In 2017 we slightly changed the methods described by Butchart et al. (2012, 2015) by randomly assigning a year to protected areas with no year of the establishment before calculating trends in coverage. This is a computationally more efficient method and is likely to reflect more accurately changes in protected area coverage over time. 

Previously the indicator was presented as the percentage of Key Biodiversity Areas completely covered by protected areas. However, it is now presented as the mean % of each Key Biodiversity Area that is covered by protected areas in order to better reflect trends in protected area coverage for countries or regions with few or no Key Biodiversity Areas that are completely covered. 

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. A number of initiatives are underway to address this limitation.
• Data and knowledge gaps can arise due to difficulties in determining whether a site conforms to the IUCN definition of a protected area, and some protected areas are not assigned management categories. 
• Site identification to date has focused on specific subsets of biodiversity, for example, birds (for Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas) and highly threatened species (for Alliance for Zero Extinction sites) while Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas have been documented to be good surrogates for biodiversity more generally (Brooks et al. 2001, Pain et al. 2005), the application of the unified standard for identification of Key Biodiversity Areas (IUCN 2016) sites across different levels of biodiversity (genes, species, ecosystems) and different taxonomic groups remains a high priority, building from efforts to date (Eken et al. 2004, Knight et al. 2007, Langhammer et al. 2007, Foster et al. 2012).
   

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/.