Progress towards international targets for protected area coverage in mountains: A multi-scale assessment

Through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the world’s governments recently adopted a target to protect “at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas” by 2020. One of the CBD’s thematic programmes of work focuses on mountains, given their importance for biodiversity and other ecosystem services, and their vulnerability to global change. We evaluated current levels of protection for mountains at multiple scales. Encouragingly, the CBD’s 17% target has already been almost met at a global scale: 16.9% of the world’s mountain areas outside Antarctica fall within protected areas. However, protection of mountain areas at finer scales remains uneven and is largely insufficient, with 63% (125) of countries, 57% (4) of realms, 67% (8) of biomes, 61% (437) of ecoregions and 53% (100) of Global 200 priority ecoregions falling short of the target. The target also calls for protected areas to be focussed “especially [at] areas of particular importance for biodiversity”. Important Bird Areas and Alliance for Zero Extinction sites represent existing global networks of such sites. It is therefore of major concern that 39% and 45% respectively of these sites in mountain areas remain entirely unprotected. Achievement of the 2020 CBD target in mountain regions will require more focused expansion of the protected area network in addition to enhanced management of individual sites and the wider countryside in order to ensure long term conservation of montane biodiversity and the other ecosystem services it provides.