Top conservation players partner to identify the most vital places for life on earth

Eleven of the world’s leading conservation organisations, including BirdLife International and the RSPB, announced an ambitious new partnership to identify, map, monitor and conserve the most important places for life on earth.

No matter where we are from on this planet, we speak a common language: the language of nature. From Pacific reefs to Siberian tundra, nature is key to our lives, so it makes sense that this importance is recognised equitably worldwide. 

Now, the environmental community speaks one new common language: KBAs, or Key Biodiversity Areas. This international language has more than 18,000 words already - that’s the number of KBAs identified to date. With more than US$15 million committed over the next five years, the Key Biodiversity Area Partnership will bring to life a new ‘gold standard’ for site conservation, with top conservation players working together to globally consistent criteria recognised by international conventions. 

Through the KBA Partnership, resources and expertise will be mobilised to further identify and map Key Biodiversity Areas worldwide. Monitoring of these sites will enable detection of potential threats and identification of appropriate conservation actions. The Partnership will also advise national governments on expanding their protected areas network, and will work with private companies to ensure they minimise and mitigate their impact on nature. 

The announcement was made at the IUCN World Conservation Congress currently taking place in Hawai?i, USA, not far from the Molokai Island marine area in Hawai?i – a KBA home to the Critically Endangered coral Porites pukoensis, known only to occur in the shallow waters of this site. 

Those familiar to BirdLife’s work with Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas (IBAs), will recognise the concept, as it originates in our work to identify 13,000 of IBAs worldwide on land and sea over the last four decades, through its 120 national Partners. The new KBA Standard is intended to harmonise all such existing approaches under a single conservation umbrella, which all environmental NGOs will hold and point directly at governments. BirdLife will be managing the new World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas^TM. 

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