Conservation community use of KBAs

The global conservation community is increasingly engaging with KBAs. KBAs were designed to harmonise approaches to identifying sites of global importance for biodiversity because of a burgeoning number of different methods. They were developed through extensive consultations with the conservation community.

While all KBAs are, by definition, important for biodiversity, the KBA Standard (Section II.13) clarifies that not all KBAs are necessarily priorities for any particular type of conservation action. However, KBAs should be a core input dataset into conservation prioritisation and systematic conservation planning, recognising that other information, including costs and opportunities, is often also important, and that conservation priority actions may also be outside of KBAs.

Systematic conservation planning is usually undertaken at the local/national scale but may not recognise sites that are of global importance as a result. Incorporating KBAs in these analyses can help flag sites that are of global value and for which a country has a responsibility to the global community to conserve. The one action for which all KBAs are priorities, given that re-evaluation and monitoring is required under the KBA Standard (Section II.10), is monitoring and vigilance. For further information, see here.