Planning Effective Conservation Landscapes for Nature and People: What Have We Learned?

Dear Colleagues,

Our planet is in the midst of several interrelated global crises caused by humankind: biodiversity loss, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These crises, their impacts on nature and people, and our responses have profound implications for how we plan and manage our environment and the use of land available for conservation. Protected areas have long been promoted as a key instrument to counter biodiversity loss and climate change, provide critical ecosystem goods and services, and generate human health and wellbeing benefits. As a result, protected areas already cover around 15% of the global land surface. However, while many protected areas have been shown to deliver certain benefits for nature and people, they have not yet, overall, turned the tide on the global environmental crises and, at the same time, have often caused conflicts with indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) who depend on natural resources for their living. Moreover, many if not most protected areas are too underfunded and understaffed to achieve their objectives, resulting in so-called ‘paper parks’.

At the same time, increasingly ambitious, area-based conservation targets (e.g., 30% or 50% of all land) are being promoted globally to stem the rising tide of biodiversity loss. New, global, or continental blueprints for conservation are published almost weekly. In addition, many governments continue to establish new protected areas in places where they are of limited benefit for nature and/or they meet the resistance of local people whose support is critical for the long-term success of any conservation action. In most cases, these coarse-scale, top-down approaches have not helped to design effective conservation landscapes that meet the multiple objectives of conservation, restoration, and sustainable use to support food security and local livelihoods.

Hence, it is time to review what has and hasn’t worked in planning, implementing, and financing functioning conservation landscapes that deliver both measurable conservation outcomes alongside critical goods and services for the local people that depend on them. The planning, management, and governance of such landscapes inevitably has to involve IPCLs and has to make use of a wide range of instruments such as effectively managed and equitably governed protected and conserved areas (PACAs), connectivity conservation areas (CCAs), transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs), indigenous peoples’ and community conserved territories and areas (ICCAs), and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). The success of all these approaches will ultimately depend on governments and other conservation actors and donors upholding human rights, social safeguards, good governance, and equity. Holistic, landscape-level planning approaches that involve all relevant rights holders and stakeholders, from the onset, are needed to design the multifunctional, self-sustaining conservation landscapes that we need to address the key planetary challenges of our time.

We therefore invite contributions covering, for example, the following topics:

• Innovative approaches for planning and managing multifunctional conservation landscapes;
• Holistic, landscape-level approaches to conservation planning and management;
• Lessons learned from multi-stakeholder planning approaches and/or collaborative management approaches;
• Examples of functioning conservation landscapes, including biosphere reserves, involving instruments such as PACAs, CCAs, TFCAs, ICCAs, and/or OECMs;
• Strategies and examples for achieving long-term financial sustainability in conservation landscapes, including through sustainable wildlife economies; and
• New tools and technologies to support multi-stakeholder planning approaches and/or collaborative management approaches.

Mr. Bastian Bertzky
Dr. Colleen Corrigan
Dr. Susan Snyman
Guest Editors

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• multifunctional conservation landscapes
• multi-stakeholder planning approaches
• collaborative management approaches
• innovative financing approaches
• protected and conserved areas (PACAs)
• connectivity conservation areas (CCAs)
• transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs)
• indigenous peoples’ and community conserved territories and areas (ICCAs)
• other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs)
• Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework