Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the KBA Standard and Partnership, this year's report highlights the significant global progress in identifying and protecting Key Biodiversity Areas. Forty-six countries now have KBA National Coordination Groups, and efforts to expand KBA networks are nearly doubling the number of identified sites on average. The 2025 relaunch of the KBA website and new training initiatives have improved access to KBA information for governments, conservationists, donors, and businesses, while international conventions increasingly use KBA data to track biodiversity conservation progress. This report also highlights growing efforts to identify marine KBAs and outlines continued expansion across species, ecosystems, and regions over the next decade.

This report highlights some of the progress the KBA Partnership has made in implementing the KBA Programme and Strategic Plan in 2024. There have been notable achievements in countries completing comprehensive assessments of their KBA networks in Bolivia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Gabon, Peru, South Africa, and Uganda.

This report highlights some of the progress the KBA Partnership has made in implementing the KBA Programme and Strategic Plan in 2023. It has been an exciting year, as funding from the Bezos Earth Fund supported comprehensive assessments of KBAs in three countries in the Congo Basin (Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Republic of Congo) and four countries in the Andes (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru).

This year was special for biodiversity. The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was finally signed in December 2022. This framework consists of 4 goals and 23 targets. Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) will play a major role in helping achieve several of these targets and contribute notably to achieving goal A.

This year has been a busy one as the KBA Programme starts to catch up on the activities that had to be halted during the covid pandemic. The exciting news is that the Bezos Earth Fund has given a grant through BirdLife International of $5 million to support the KBA Programme at the end of 2021.

Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) will be critical in guiding where protected and conserved areas are placed over the next decade. We must make sure that we focus conservation action on globally important sites and the World Database of KBAs (WDKBA) is the largest database to hold information on these sites.

The Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) Partnership was formally launched in September 2016 at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Honolulu. The KBA Secretariat was established in March 2018 and the KBA Programme developed and launched soon after.