Foreword by James Hardcastle, Head of Protected and Conserved Areas at IUCN.

For the next two weeks, representatives of the world’s Governments will meet at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in Cali, Colombia. Alongside them, a host of environmental, development and scientific agencies and civil society, including Indigenous Peoples Organisations such as the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), the official ‘IP’ representative to the CBD, and the ICCA Consortium. The private sector has also begun to show a marked presence at the COP events, starting to grapple with their expected contributions - through No Net Loss and Nature Positive commitments. 

IUCN is present alongside our members and partners, helping provide advice and share our institutional position on key issues.  

For the Protected and Conserved Areas team across the IUCN global and regional secretariat, this means bringing our members’ priorities to the fore and advancing on important IUCN Resolutions. It is also the culmination of a decade of effort in helping shape global ambition for nature conservation following the ‘Promise of Sydney’ programme of work since the last World Protected Areas Congress in Australia, in 2014. 

Building on the mandate for IUCN to advance area-based conservation, two recent Resolutions are particularly important. Firstly, Resolution 002 calls on IUCN’s collective place-based conservation work to be co-designed, co-developed and co-implemented with our Indigenous Peoples Organisation membership. Secondly, Resolution 125 calls on our membership to promote actions that secure at least 30% of the planet under equitable and effective area-based conservation respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. These two Resolutions are at the heart of our team’s strategies and actions through global and regional IUCN Protected and Conserved Areas programme hubs. 

Both Resolutions are clearly captured in full by the comprehensive UN Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and its ‘30x30 ambitions’, especially Target 3 which calls for representative, well-connected, equitable and effective systems of protected areas, other effective area-based conservation measure, and indigenous and traditional territories that deliver successful outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, on land, in our waters and across our oceans, for people and nature.  

Two years have now passed since the new GBF, and our focus must now be firmly on implementation and marking progress towards this ambition. 

To assess the status of protected and conserved areas, IUCN and the UNEP Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) jointly oversee the Protected Planet Initiative. On behalf of the CBD Parties we have produced the latest ‘Protected Planet Report 2024’ to highlight the current trends and situation with regards global reporting on 30x30. The report will be launched on 28th October, so watch this space! As shared by Heather Bingham, the lead for the Protected Planet Initiative at UNEP-WCMC, the 2024 Report highlight will be to show that, despite the challenges and obstacles, the level of ambition that is set is indeed achievable and that new and additional conservation efforts are being put in place and reported every month, in countries worldwide. The report will show that progress is being made in terms of measuring the quality of these areas, especially in terms of equity and effectiveness, and that with the support of Indigenous People’s representatives such as IIFB, more clarity is being provided on the role of Indigenous and traditional territories (ITTs).  

We are also collectively learning more and more from countries worldwide on how to interpret and recognise ‘other effective area-based conservation measures’ known as OECM. For example, our IUCN collaborations in the Republic of Korea, across Central Asia, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are providing real world examples of how these ‘OECMs’ (known as ‘nature co-existence areas’ in Korea) and potential ITTs can be integrated into national systems to help achieve fair and effective contributions to the 30% target. 

Indeed, our proposed IUCN Programme 2025 to 2029, under review and development with feedback from all of our Regional Conservation Fora, and all our supporting project collaborations, will aim to bring global ambition down to the local level, and then to reignite the international policy debate with credible and results-based local narratives of how the GBF Targets can be achieved. 

This is illustrated through our support for the IIFB position and advocacy on ‘Article 8j’, an important topic under debate at this COP. Article 8j refers to the importance of integrating traditional knowledge systems, innovations and practices into national implementation of the GBF. IIFB advocates that this set of themes is crucially important and warrants special attention through a mechanism known as a ‘Subsidiary Body on Implementation’, or SBI. How a new SBI body can be informed and the tenets of 8j implemented in practice, in important bio- and culturally diverse places, is demonstrated through IUCN’s collaborations in countries such as Tanzania, Panama, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Thailand on the ‘Inclusive Conservation Initiative’, and a new component programme of work on Indigenous Peoples and local communities with the European Commission on ‘Building Capacity for Implementation of the GBF’, focused also on Tanzania, DRC, as well as Papua New Guinea, Cameroon and Suriname. 

Our IUCN role is in connecting practitioners and decision-makers with the best possible science and knowledge. We enable this through our project portfolio. We are currently mobilising almost 100 million USD in action grants (such as BIOPAMA and BESTLIFE2030 action components) and conservation investments with our members, just through the Global Protected and Conserved Areas Team. With our regional offices combined efforts, this figure is doubled, such as through the Asia Protected Areas Partnership, our strategic support for OECM identification in Eastern and Southern Africa, and the application of the IUCN Green List in the Amazon, Mediterranean, Californian coast, Central Asia, Western Indian Ocean, Lower Mekong and Coral Triangle regions. We are also convening and mobilising with IUCN expert professional networks, such as the World Commission on Protected Areas, WCPA. We seek to enhance the enabling conditions, including financing, capacity exchange, recognition and visibility, to ultimately influence the supporting policies that frame and advance nature conservation on the ground.  

Through our Act30 partnership we support national dialogues on how 30x30 can be fairly and effectively achieved. Elements of these are already underway in many countries and newly planned for Morocco and Guatemala later in 2024 and into 2025. Collaboration with IIFB means we can bring the best guidance and advice to countries on how to include ‘ITT’ into their national systems. The expertise of our partner Esri brings mapping technology to the fingertips of those whose lands and territories could potentially count towards the global 30% target. An event on October 28th at the Geo Pavilion will showcase commitments from countries to Act30, joining Guatemala, Honduras, Thailand, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Jordan and Egypt as early partners in this approach. All Act30 guidance, lessons and experience form part of our partnership offering to the High Ambition Coalition for People and Nature (HAC).  

Importantly, four IUCN Regional Offices, including Asia, West Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and the Mediterranean, are also selected by Parties for recognition by the CBD as ‘Sub-Regional Technical, Scientific Cooperation Centres’ for coordinated and informed GBF implementation. 

Part of IUCN’s added value to countries is the IUCN Green List Standard for effective protected and conserved areas, which through support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is going from strength to strength. Over 1,000 sites worldwide are using the Standard to help achieve conservation outcomes, covering more than 200 million hectares of important ecosystems, with 12 new areas recognised through our independent certification process and added to the ‘Green List’ just now in October 2024. These new sites include Los Katios World Heritage Area in Colombia, the host of the CBD COP 16, and King Salman Royal Reserve and the Ibex Nature Reserve, the first two areas in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  

A celebration on 27th October will recognise country commitments and deliver Green List awards to new and renewed protected and conserved areas, of different ‘pathway’ designations to the 30% target.  

New country commitments are being made to the Green List, and IUCN is following up through catalytic partnerships that can advance effective area-based conservation for important systems. For example, in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism and Environment of Albania, the company Patagonia, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Geospatial technology company Esri, the Green List Standard is being used to frame the development of the new Vjosa Wild River National Park and will be applied to 25 national protected areas designations in the country.  

Indeed, the IUCN Green List is already recognised by CBD Decision XIII/2 and the Standard features as a complementary indicator for countri