Abstract
AbstractProtected areas are a cornerstone strategy for terrestrial and increasingly marine biodiversity conservation, but their use for conserving inland waters has received comparatively scant attention. In 2010, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) included a target of 17% protection for inland waters, yet there has been no meaningful way of measuring progress toward that target. Defining and evaluating “protection” is especially complicated for rivers because their integrity is intimately linked to impacts in their upstream catchments. A new generation of global hydrographic data now enables a high‐resolution, standardized assessment of how upland activities may be propagated downstream. Here, we develop and apply, globally, a river protection metric that integrates both local and upstream catchment protection. We found that “integrated” river protection is highly variable across geographies and river size classes and in most basins falls short of the 17% CBD target. Around the world, about 70% of river reaches (by length) have no protected areas in their upstream catchments, and only 11.1% (by length) achieve full integrated protection. The average level of integrated protection is 13.5% globally, yet the majority of the world's largest basins show averages below 10%. Within basins, gaps are particularly severe for larger rivers.
Highlights
The world’s inland waters––rivers, lakes, springs, ground waters, and wetlands––contain exceptional numbers of species, provide critical ecosystem services, and are among the most threatened ecosystems globally (Dudgeon et al 2005; Balian et al 2008; Vorosmarty et al 2010)
We propose a four-tiered approach to define the protection status of a river by calculating: (1) “local protection,” which refers to all river reaches that lie within Protected area (PA); (2) “upland protection,” which measures the percentage of protection of the upstream catchment area associated with each river reach; (3) “achieved target protection,” which determines the deviation from a proposed upland protection threshold that represents sufficient protection; and (4) “integrated protection,” which combines the requirement of local protection and achieved target protection
We have demonstrated that our proposed indicator of “integrated river protection” is a viable alternative to the traditional “within the fenceline” approach to gap assessments, in which systems are counted as protected or not based on whether they fall within PA boundaries
Summary
The world’s inland waters––rivers, lakes, springs, ground waters, and wetlands––contain exceptional numbers of species, provide critical ecosystem services, and are among the most threatened ecosystems globally (Dudgeon et al 2005; Balian et al 2008; Vorosmarty et al 2010). The extent to which PAs can and do benefit inland waters has been little examined, with global assessments focusing squarely on terrestrial and marine systems (Watson et al 2014). Measuring the protection of inland waters is of more than academic interest. In 2010, for the first time, the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) PA target (Aichi Target 11) required that “at least 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas . Are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas . Even putting aside the important qualifiers of management, representation, and connectivity, 6 years on there remains no globally comprehensive gap analysis of inland waters to provide information on where the numeric 17% target is unmet
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