Global Protected Area Expansion: Creating More than Paper Parks

Aichi target 11 of the Convention of Biological Diversity promotes the expansion of the global protected area network to cover 17 percent of all terrestrial land and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas by 2020 (www.cbd.int/sp/targets). At the recent World Parks Congress, organized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Sydney, Australia, 12 innovative approaches were promoted as part of the “Promise of Sydney” to help transform decisionmaking, policy, capacity, and financing for protected areas in the next decade (http://io.aibs.org/syd). The first of such approaches includes a list of 20 important recommendations to help reach conservation goals. Many of these recommendations are provided for single countries to take action individually. In addition, the final recommendation advocates that a more ambitious target of protection (50 percent global protection) should be promoted to more adequately conserve biodiversity. Both points are problematic: recent research shows that facilitating international collaboration among countries is crucial to identifying and implementing a well-connected system of protected areas that can better represent threatened biodiversity, and setting unrealistic and politically challenging global protection targets is unneeded. This Viewpoint presents three main themes of the recommendations that would benefit from greater emphasis and the promotion of the importance of international collaborations.