A key step toward updating KBA networks across Europe
Author: KBA Communications
All European countries have KBAs identified, most for bird species resulting from the Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas Programme. As a result, many KBAs in Europe have only been identified for bird species, which form 56.6% of all species that qualify KBAs. Additional sites have been identified in Mediterranean countries through the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) ecosystem profile for that region, but many using legacy KBA criteria and there is a need to update these sites.
In an effort to advance KBA assessments and reassessment in Europe, a new report authored by Andrew Plumptre and Daniel Baisero from the Key Biodiversity Areas Secretariat summarises the results of a scoping of KBAs across Europe made with support from the United Kingdom Research and Innovation fund (UKRI) as part of a Horizon Europe project called NaturaConnect. The report focused on identifying where existing KBAs identified using legacy criteria could meet the IUCN global Standard for KBAs, where existing protected areas could meet KBA status, and where sites outside existing protected areas, identified by the NaturaConnect project for biodiversity conservation, could meet KBA status.
The findings show these key results:
- Only 21.9% of the existing KBA network has been assessed to meet the criteria in the Global KBA Standard. The scoping analysis indicates that 74.5% could meet these criteria if comprehensively assessed.
- It was predicted that an additional 12,468 protected areas (7.5% of all European protected areas) could potentially be global KBAs, making a total of 16,450 (9.9%), including existing protected areas that are already KBAs.
- Many protected areas are small in Europe, and larger sites are more likely to qualify as KBAs because they are more likely to hold larger populations of species. Analysing the surface area of protected areas rather than numbers shows that the 16,450 protected areas, that are existing or potential KBAs, could cover 79.4% of the area of the existing European protected area network. Of this, the surface area of 71.6% of terrestrial and 87.6% of coastal and marine protected areas could potentially qualify as KBAs.
- Currently, only 186 species qualify existing global KBAs as assessed against the KBA Global Standard, of which 142 are birds. This could increase to 4,052 species if all KBAs were comprehensively assessed. Identifying KBAs in the existing protected area network could add 1,979 species that might qualify these protected areas as KBAs.
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Of the priority areas for protected area expansion identified by the NaturaConnect systematic conservation planning analysis, 46.4% would potentially qualify as KBAs, mostly in southern Europe and around the Alps. These would add an additional 63 KBA qualifying species beyond those that might qualify existing KBAs or protected areas if fully assessed.
These results show that the largest protected areas that are not currently recognised as KBAs across Europe likely qualify as such because they hold globally significant populations of species. Together with existing KBAs, they conserve many of the potential species that might qualify sites as KBAs in Europe, although there are some important areas outside of both the existing protected area and KBA networks that might also meet KBA status.
However, the scoping is based on species assessed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and this is not comprehensive for species across Europe. Many plants and invertebrates are not assessed on the Red List, and more species may likely be found and additional sites identified if additional data on un-assessed species are included.