Phd in ENVIRONMENTAL AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Thesis title: Improving indicators for measuring species threat reduction by 2030 and implications for the 2030 targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity

Biodiversity is essential for ecosystem stability and human well-being, but human activity has intensified pressures on nature, leading to biodiversity decline and ecosystem degradation. In response, international efforts have aimed to guide global action through the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Within the Framework are a series of international biodiversity targets to achieve by 2030 alongside which is a standardised monitoring framework that pairs each target with a series of headline and complementary indicators to assess progress. However, many of these indicators are percentage coverage metrics that can only assess the quantitative aspects of targets without measuring their qualitative characteristics and have been increasingly critiqued for their limited ecological relevance. Protected areas are an effective instrument for reducing land-use changes associated with biodiversity losses and are among the most widely used conservation strategies worldwide, yet assessing their ability to reduce human pressures remains difficult to measure. Evaluating the impact of protected areas requires methods that can assess what would have happened in the absence of protection such as statistical matching and fixed effect panel regressions. These quasi-experimental approaches help control for confounding variables and correct for biases in protected area placement, offering more reliable estimates of effectiveness. Effective conservation strategies are shaped by ecological and political dynamics, which are becoming increasingly strained by global geopolitical instability. Scenario planning helps navigate these uncertainties by modelling potential futures and informing adaptive strategies. As urban populations grow and demand for natural resources intensifies, the factors affecting the capacity of protected areas to resist encroachment has become increasingly critical to evaluate. Therefore, the overarching goal of this PhD thesis is to explore how periods of political uncertainty affect long-term conservation outcomes and the achievement of international biodiversity targets, especially related to protected areas. To address this, the research is structured around three core objectives. The first objective is to assess the influence that geopolitical shifts have on progress toward international biodiversity targets. Through a literature review and expert knowledge, the second chapter presents a policy perspective that discusses the impact of the escalation of the war in Ukraine in early 2022 on the drivers of biodiversity loss. Specifically, international policy changes to global trade routes, agriculture, and energy production made in response to the war were found to potentially impact socioeconomic scenarios used to set and assess biodiversity targets. The policies made in response to the war had immediate and far-reaching impacts on biodiversity, and policies that may seem regionally focused, in fact have worldwide implications through global-to-local-to-global linkages. The disruption to the global geopolitical landscape provides a window of opportunity for policy reform and the radical societal paradigm shift that is needed to tackle the global biodiversity crisis. This result highlights the importance of re-evaluating the progress made towards goals set in multilateral environmental agreements with more focus on regionalisation scenarios to account for the increased uncertainty in the future storylines. Furthermore, I recommend developing new socioeconomic storylines that reflect the changes made to production and consumption patterns and which focus on a de-globalisation pathway. These would not replace the existing scenarios but would broaden our horizon to ensure that it encapsulates all possible futures, to increase our chances at meeting international biodiversity targets. Finally, I recommend mainstreaming biodiversity so that all policy decisions have a long-term vision that considers nature. The second objective of this thesis is to evaluate the effectiveness of the global network of terrestrial protected areas on reducing human pressures within their boundaries. To achieve this, Chapter 3 uses nearest neighbour statistical matching at a 1km resolution across the globe to estimate the effect of protected areas on the threats identified on the IUCN Red List threat classification scheme. Overall, protected areas reduce, but do not eliminate threats to wildlife, and strict and small protected areas tend to be most effective even though they are situated in areas with lower pressures. Specifically, protected areas reduce nine of twelve threats, including the presence of residential and commercial areas, annual and perennial non-timber crops, wood and pulp plantations, livestock farming and ranching, mining and quarrying, renewable energy, roads and railroads, utility and service lines, and light pollution. Two threats, oil & gas drilling and dams, are not significantly different compared to matched control areas, and one threat, fire, showed higher levels inside protected areas. Our results show substantial regional heterogeneity in the effectiveness of protected areas and the disconnection between effectiveness and endemic species richness. With these results, I recommend that countries with low protected area coverage should focus on establishing and expanding protected areas, while countries with high coverage should instead prioritize enhancing the effectiveness of existing areas, and this is particularly important in countries with high endemic and threatened species richness. The third objective is to examine the role of economic development and the strength of political systems on the performance of protected areas. Chapter 4 uses statistical matching and a panel dataset from 2000 to 2020 to assess the heterogeneity in protected area effectiveness in preventing urbanisation within their boundaries. It focuses on two aspects of urbanisation, specifically built area and nighttime light, and analyses the influence of the socioeconomic and political context on protected area performance. The results show that globally protected areas are effective at reducing land conversion to built-up areas, but not at limiting light pollution. Furthermore, the rate of economic development affects protected area performance, yet the political context matters more. Stronger protection for minorities through more liberal political institutions, and higher state capacity had the biggest effect on protected area effectiveness by significantly reducing built area and increasing nighttime light inside their boundaries. The political context does not uniformly influence all aspects of urbanisation in PAs but instead shapes how and where urbanisation occurs. Ensuring the long-term success of PAs requires integrating them into stable, inclusive, and well-governed political systems. The results from this chapter can contribute to improving conservation policy, offering new insights into how regime change and leadership priorities can affect long-term conservation outcomes. Chapter 5 discusses how the overall findings can assess how periods of political uncertainty affect conservation outcomes and may impact the achievement of international biodiversity targets. While area-based targets like 30×30 are important for setting ambition and guiding national strategies, the percentage-based aspects of them are insufficient in isolation. Integrating threat-based analyses helps bridge this gap by identifying where and how protection efforts contribute to biodiversity outcomes. There is a need to move beyond simply increasing protected area coverage and instead focus on improving management effectiveness and threat mitigation to achieve meaningful biodiversity outcomes. To address these challenges, protected areas must be integrated into broader landscapes and national policies, involve diverse stakeholders, and adapt to dynamic socio-political contexts to ensure long-term conservation success. Biodiversity conservation must adapt to an increasingly complex and uncertain geopolitical landscape. Addressing the biodiversity crisis requires collective and coordinated global action, however this may become more difficult with increasing international instability with an increase in conflict, shifting alliances, and nationalism. Ultimately, the future of biodiversity conservation will depend not just on meeting fixed targets, but on the ability of global and national actors to adapt to shifting politics while remaining committed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 2050 vision of a world of living in harmony with nature.