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Datasets, Tools & Reports

The World's Protected Areas: Status, Value and Prospects in the 21st Century »

Based on input from more than 100 experts, this book aims to provide the most detailed assessment ever of the worldwide distribution and conservation status of national parks and reserves. It examines the relationship between people and protected areas, investigates threats and opportunities, cites the history of protected areas, provides expert conservation advice and celebrates the success of protected areas around the world. Edited by Stuart Chape, Mark Spalding and Martin Jenkins, with foreword by Achim Steiner and Julia Marton-Lefèvre.
Resource Type: Books
A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010 »

Horizon scanning identifies emerging issues in a given field sufficiently early to conduct research to inform policy and practice. Our group of horizon scanners, including academics and researchers, convened to identify fifteen nascent issues that could affect the conservation of biological diversity. These include the impacts of and potential human responses to climate change, novel biological and digital technologies, novel pollutants and invasive species. We expect to repeat this process and collation annually.
Resource Type: Journal Papers
Capacity building for biological diversity – a situation and needs analysis for the Environmental Management Group (EMG) »

The Environmental Management Group (EMG). in 2004, decided to focus its attention on environmental capacity building, following concerns of UN agencies and multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in this area. Consultants were asked to prepare draft studies for the further work of the EMG on capacity building in the areas of biological diversity and chemicals, respectively. The draft studies were further developed following discussions in the EMG and an Issue Management Group established by the EMG. This paper is the result of these discussions for the area of capacity building for biological diversity.
Resource Type: Reports
Prospects for Biodiversity »

Assuming no radical transformation in human behavior, we can expect important changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services by 2050. A considerable number of species extinctions will have taken place. Existing large blocks of tropical forest will be much reduced and fragmented, but temperate forests and some tropical forests will be stable or increasing in area, although the latter will be biotically impoverished. Marine ecosystems will be very different from today's, with few large marine predators, and freshwater biodiversity will be severely reduced almost everywhere. These changes will not, in themselves, threaten the survival of humans as a species.
Resource Type: Journal Papers
Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy »

Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.
Resource Type: Journal Papers
Outcomes, not implementation, predict conservation success »

We applied a conceptual framework and score-card developed by the Cambridge Conservation Forum (CCF) to a sample of 60 conservation activities to determine the predictive power of implementation measures versus measures of key outcomes (later steps in the models defined in the CCF tools). We show that assessing key outcomes is often more difficult than quantifying the degree of implementation of a project but that, while implementation is a poor predictor of success, key outcomes provide a feasible and much more reliable proxy for whether a project will deliver real conservation benefits. The CCF framework and evaluation tool provide a powerful basis for synthesizing past experience and, with wider application, will help to identify factors that affect the success of conservation activities.
Resource Type: Journal Papers
United Nations List of Protected Areas (2003) »

The 2003 UN List of Protected Areas, the thirteenth produced since 1962, records the global community's endeavour to conserve the Earth's natural places. This is the first version to attempt a comprehensive presentation of all the world's known protected areas, listing 102,102 sites covering 18.8 million sq km compared to just over 1,000 protected areas in 1962.
Resource Type: Reports
Ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation and mitigation – good practice examples and lessons learned in Europe »

This report documents and analyses good practice examples of ecosystem-based approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation in Europe. Case studies on ecosystem-based approaches to mitigation involved peatland restoration or conservation (11 projects) and forest conservation, restoration and reforestation (2 projects). Case studies on ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation were divided into inland waters (28 projects), coastal zone (10 projects), agriculture and forestry (11 projects) and cities (9 projects).
Resource Type: Reports
Climate Change and the Biodiversity of European Islands »
Review of the Literature on the Links between Biodiversity and Climate Change »

UNEP-WCMC has been providing technical support to the work of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on biodiversity and climate change. We carried out three reviews of the recent scientific literature and these fed into the deliberations of the CBD’s Second Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (AHTEG) on Biodiversity and Climate Change. These reviews, entitled Links between Biodiversity and Climate change: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation, have now been published as no 42 of the CBD Technical Series. This publication complements the main report from the CBD AHTEG which appears as CBD Technical Series No. 41 Connecting Biodiversity and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation.
Resource Type: Reports