Journal Article
Relating characteristics of global biodiversity targets to reported progress
Elizabeth J. Green; Graeme M. Buchanan; Stuart H. M. Butchart; Georgina M. Chandler; Neil D. Burgess; Samantha L. L. Hill; Richard D. Gregory
Conservation Biology · Vol. 33, Issue 6 · pp. 1360-1369 · 2019
Abstract
To inform governmental discussions on the nature of a revised Strategic Plan for Biodiversity of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), we reviewed the relevant literature and assessed the framing of the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets in the current strategic plan. We asked international experts from nongovernmental organizations, academia, government agencies, international organizations, research institutes, and the CBD to score the Aichi Targets and their constituent elements against a set of specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, unambiguous, scalable, and comprehensive criteria (SMART based, excluding time bound because all targets are bound to 2015 or 2020). We then investigated the relationship between these expert scores and reported progress toward the target elements by using the findings from 2 global progress assessments (Global Biodiversity Outlook and the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). We analyzed the data with ordinal logistic regressions. We found significant positive relationships ( p