Biodiversity is the foundation of a healthy planet and key to sustainable development. Diverse ecosystems provide clean water and food and regulate our climate, supporting both well-being and economic progress. Forests, oceans, and wetlands help stabilize the climate, protect against natural disasters, and support livelihoods in agriculture, fisheries, and ecotourism. As climate change and habitat destruction threaten these ecosystems, biodiversity conservation becomes essential for a resilient, prosperous future.
Despite its importance, the world faces a biodiversity crisis. Nearly one million species are nearing extinction, with species loss occurring at 1,000 times the natural rate. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services emphasizes that even with growing awareness of humanity's reliance on nature, extinction rates continue to rise due to habitat destruction, overexploitation, pollution, illegal trade, invasive species, and climate change.
Addressing this crisis requires urgent, coordinated global action. Since ecosystems and species habitats cross borders, coordinated action from all countries is critical to restore habitats and protect endangered species. Governments, industries, and communities must work together to develop stronger policies, increase conservation funding, and enforce protection.
Reliable, up-to-date biodiversity data are crucial for effective conservation. Location-specific data help identify species at risk and monitor environmental changes, but limited access to public data, especially in developing regions, hinders progress. Traditional metrics focusing on terrestrial vertebrates are inadequate for emerging threats, and underfunded institutions struggle to keep data current, further widening the gap. Improved data collection and sharing are urgently needed for effective conservation strategies.
In a previous blog, we introduced the World Bank’s high-resolution gridded global biodiversity database, covering nearly 600,000 species, including animals, plants, and other species across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. Built using machine-based pattern recognition on 50 years of georeferenced data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the database reveals 272,189 endemic species and 85,310 species at risk because they have very small occurrence regions. This new resource addresses a key knowledge gap, enabling more effective and targeted biodiversity conservation worldwide.
Expanding species coverage beyond terrestrial vertebrates has reshaped global conservation priorities. The new species maps highlight additional countries that are critical for biodiversity preservation, as distributions of other species often differ from those of terrestrial vertebrates. Notably, nearly each country has at least one species group with a high global priority, emphasizing the need for broader conservation efforts to protect previously-overlooked species and ecosystems.
Alongside new findings about country-level priorities, geographic analyses of our database have provided many insights about the conservation status of species that inhabit disputed territories, fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), transboundary regions, international waters, and marine joint regimes worldwide. Biodiversity conservation in these sensitive regions faces major challenges:
In disputed territories, weak policies and fragile institutions complicate conservation. Conflicting territorial claims lead to inconsistent law enforcement, make data collection and monitoring difficult and lead to natural resource mismanagement.
In conflict-affected regions, institutional collapse disrupts conservation efforts. Civil wars create power vacuums, allowing corruption and illegal resource exploitation. Countries with high institutional fragility struggle to implement long-term environmental strategies due to weak governance.
In transboundary ecosystems, like the Mekong River Basin, Central Albertine Rift and joint marine area between Colombia and Jamaica, effective conservation requires international cooperation, but variations in data collection can undermine unified efforts.
Our database provides detailed species information for these geopolitically complex regions, supporting conservation efforts.
In contested regions, biodiversity conservation can provide a bridge for dialogue and trust-building among divided groups. The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, spanning Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, provides an example of how conservation fosters peace and cooperation. Stakeholders can collaborate across political boundaries by focusing on shared goals such as nature-based livelihoods and climate resilience. Reliable and comparable biodiversity data are crucial for collaboration, because they provide a common understanding of conservation opportunities and help unite participants in building evidence-based initiatives. In this context, our data offer a neutral platform for dialogue and a baseline for conservation efforts. With a rapid-update algorithm integrating the latest GBIF reports, we can help ensure up-to-date monitoring and evaluation of conservation initiatives.
Our database will also support the Global 2030 Target 3 (Conserve 30% of land, waters and seas) of the Biodiversity Plan of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, by providing neutral, comparable, georeferenced environmental information for fragile and conflict-affected regions, disputed areas, transboundary areas and international waters. In addition, the database will support the World Bank's Climate Change Development Reports (CCDRs) for client countries, as well as ESS6 (Biodiversity Conservation) during project preparation and implementation in geopolitically complex regions.
If you’re interested in the new database and our research on Species Occurrence Regions, please see Revisiting Global Biodiversity: A Spatial Analysis of Species Occurrence Data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 10821.
For more on environment and natural resource management as a pathway to peace, visit the World Bank report published in 2022.
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Global Environment Facility.
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