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Global protected area extent has increased recently but often outside areas of biodiversity importance. Governments recently committed to conserving 30% of land and seas, especially “areas of particular importance for biodiversity.” Reviewing site-based conservation approaches, we propose harnessing key biodiversity area criteria to target such locations.

Comprehensive assessments of species’ extinction risks have documented the extinction crisis1and underpinned strategies for reducing those risks2. Global assessments reveal that, among tetrapods, 40.7% of amphibians, 25.4% of mammals and 13.6% of birds are threatened with extinction3. Because global assessments have been lacking, reptiles have been omitted from conservation-prioritization analyses that encompass other tetrapods4–7. Reptiles are unusually diverse in arid regions, suggesting that they may have different conservation needs6. Here we provide a comprehensive extinction-risk assessment of reptiles and show that at least 1,829 out of 10,196 species (21.1%) are threatened—confirming a previous extrapolation8and representing 15.6 billion years of phylogenetic diversity. Reptiles are threatened by the same major factors that threaten other tetrapods—agriculture, logging, urban development and invasive species—although the threat posed by climate change remains uncertain. Reptiles inhabiting forests, where these threats are strongest, are more threatened than those in arid habitats, contrary to our prediction. Birds, mammals and amphibians are unexpectedly good surrogates for the conservation of reptiles, although threatened reptiles with the smallest ranges tend to be isolated from other threatened tetrapods. Although some reptiles—including most species of crocodiles and turtles—require urgent, targeted action to prevent extinctions, efforts to protect other tetrapods, such as habitat preservation and control of trade and invasive species, will probably also benefit many reptiles.

Extensive ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as being central to conserving biodiversity1and stabilizing the climate of the Earth2. Although ambitious national and global targets have been set, global priority areas that account for spatial variation in benefits and costs have yet to be identified. Here we develop and apply a multicriteria optimization approach that identifies priority areas for restoration across all terrestrial biomes, and estimates their benefits and costs. We find that restoring 15% of converted lands in priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 299 gigatonnes of CO2—30% of the total CO2increase in the atmosphere, or 14% of total emissions, since the Industrial Revolution. The inclusion of several biomes is key to achieving multiple benefits. Cost effectiveness can increase up to 13-fold when spatial allocation is optimized using our multicriteria approach, which highlights the importance of spatial planning. Our results confirm the vast potential contributions of restoration to addressing global challenges, while underscoring the necessity of pursuing these goals synergistically.

The UNEP-SETAC life cycle initiative recently recommended use of the countryside species–area relationship (SAR) model to calculate the characterization factors (CFs; potential species loss per m2) for projecting the biodiversity impact of land use associated with a products’ life cycle. However, CFs based on this approach are to date available for only six broad land use types without differentiating between their management intensities and have large uncertainties that limit their practical applicability. Here we derive updated CFs for projecting potential species losses of five taxa resulting from five broad land use types (managed forests, plantations, pasture, cropland, urban) under three intensity levels (minimal, light, and intense use) in each of the 804 terrestrial ecoregions. We utilize recent global land use intensity maps and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) habitat classification scheme to parametrize the SAR model. As a case study, we compare the biodiversity impacts of 1 m3of wood produced under four different forest management regimes in India and demonstrate that the new land use intensity-specific CFs have smaller uncertainty intervals and are able to discern the impacts of intensively managed land uses from the low intensity regimes, which has not been possible through previous CFs.

For 50 years, the IUCN Commissions, Secretariat, Members such as BirdLife International and partners such as UNEP-WCMC have been mobilising biodiversity and conservation knowledge products, which are fundamentally important for tracking progress towards 10 of the 20 Aichi Targets, and should similarly become so for seven of the emerging 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Each of these knowledge products comprises standards, governance and quality control, data sets, tools, capacity building and ongoing processes for derivation of biodiversity indicators. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, established in 1964, documents extinction risk for more than 76,000 species. Protected Planet, working from the mandate to provide the UN List of Protected Areas, is convened jointly with UNEP and documents ~220,000 protected areas. The Red List of Ecosystems aims to assess the risk of collapse of ecosystems, and is currently being piloted in a number of countries. Key Biodiversity Areas are sites contributing significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity, identified at national levels using globally standard criteria. The system has been developed over the last four decades by BirdLife International and others with ~15,000 sites identified; it is anticipated that IUCN will approve the umbrella standard around these existing approaches in 2015. Of the 55 global indicators mobilised for mid-term assessment of progress towards the Aichi Targets for the fourth Global Biodiversity Outlook, nearly a third were wholly or partly based on these knowledge products (spanning 10 of the Aichi Targets). Indicators derived from these knowledge products will also be applicable to seven of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, annual investment into these knowledge products is currently only a fraction of that necessary to maintain their currency, quality, and scope. If these key indicators towards the Aichi Targets are to be maintained, sustainable long-term financing mechanisms must be established to resource the underlying knowledge products.

Deforestation is a major source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and the greatest single driver of species extinctions. The reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) has been formally recognized as a climate change mitigation option. REDD might have important co-benefits for biodiversity conservation, yet the extent of these benefits will depend on as-yet untested associations between fine-scale spatial patterns of deforestation, species distributions and carbon stocks. Here we combine a global land-use model and spatial data on species distributions to explore scenarios of future deforestation within REDD-eligible countries, to quantify and map the potential impacts on species extinctions as increased by forest loss and decreased by carbon conservation. We found that the continuation of historical deforestation rates is likely to result in large numbers of species extinctions, but that an adequately funded REDD programme could substantially reduce these losses. Under our deforestation scenarios, the projected benefits of REDD were remarkably consistent across the four methods used to estimate extinctions, but spatially variable, and highly dependent on the level of carbon payments. Our results indicate that, if well designed, adequately funded and broadly implemented, carbon-based forest conservation could play a major role in biodiversity conservation as well as climate change mitigation.

We studied fluctuating asymmetry (FA) in the tarsus length of seven forest-restricted bird species, two of which are globally critically endangered, in three indigenous forest remnants of a recently fragmented, afrotropical biodiversity hot spot. Based on mixed regression analysis and an extension of Levene's test, individuals from the most degraded fragment showed four- to sevenfold higher asymmetry levels compared to those from the least degraded one, with intermediate levels in the moderately disturbed fragment. When comparing contemporary FA levels with measurements of museum specimens collected 50 years ago, we found highly significant increases in asymmetry in the most degraded fragment but no differences in the least degraded one. These strikingly parallel spatial and temporal patterns across species confirm that repeated measurements of FA can provide a sensitive early warning system for monitoring stress effects in highly threatened ecosystems.