To highlight and examine apparent paradoxes in assessing the effectiveness of different forms of land-use for biodiversity conservation. Tanzania. We compare and contrast the findings of two recent and seemingly conflicting studies on the effectiveness of conservation protection strategies in Tanzania. We evaluate these studies in the context of a wider body of evidence relating to the problem of determining protected area performance.

Protected areas are regarded as the most important tool in the conservation toolbox. They cover > 12% of the Earth's terrestrial area, with over half of this designated since 1970, and are thus a unique example of governments and other stakeholders consciously changing management of land and water at a significant scale. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has a global programme to complete ecologically-representative protected area networks, and this is driving the creation of large numbers of new protected areas.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the changes in the fragmentation and ecological stability of the floodplain forest geobiocoenoses in the Protected Landscape Area Litovelske Pomoravi, Czech Republic. Using GIS methods, it was determined that the fragmentation within the study area had increased slightly and the ecological stability of the landscape had decreased slightly between the years 1938 and 2006, although the latter remained on a fairly high level.

Changes in landscape composition and structure may impact the conservation and management of protected areas. Species that depend on specific habitats are at risk of extinction when these habitats are degraded or lost. Designing robust methods to evaluate landscape composition will assist decision- and policy-making in emerging landscapes. This paper describes a rapid assessment methodology aimed at evaluating land-cover quality for birds, plants, butterflies and bees around seven UK Natura 2000 sites.

The introduction to this set of papers highlights four challenges to the large-scale analysis of population growth at protected area edges in Africa and Latin America undertaken by George Wittemyer and colleagues in their 2008 paper published in Science. First, it raises questions about their sampling procedures, given national-level variation in systems of protected area designation and protected area estates. Second, it challenges the largely economic model of migration decisions that underlies their analysis.

Recent expansion of the scale of human activities poses severe threats to Earth’s life-support systems. Increasingly, protected areas (PAs) are expected to serve dual goals: protect biodiversity and secure ecosystem services. We report a nationwide assessment for China, quantifying the provision of threatened species habitat and four key regulating services—water retention, soil retention, sandstorm prevention, and carbon sequestration—in nature reserves (the primary category of PAs in China).

Dr Tom Brooks, Head, Science and Knowledge International Union for Conservation of Nature UNECE, Committee on Environmental Policy, presentation on Biodiversity Indicators: UNECE and the SDGS at the 12th Session of the Joint Task Force on Environmental Statistics and Indicators, 17 November 2016.

This review follows a five day day field based learning session on the failure to implement the co management agreement in Dwesa Cwebe. It highlights a range of problems evident in 2007/8 including:

Mongolia has very significant natural resources and a large part of the population is dependent on them for their daily living. The impact of the state of the environment on the living standards of herders is obvious, but also Mongolians living in the capital Ulaanbaatar have learned that air pollution, especially in winter, and other environmental problems have a deep impact on their living standards. The Government of the Netherlands has established a Trust Fund at the World Bank to support environmental activities in Mongolia.

In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, 2005) provided the first comprehensive report on global ecosystems, the dependence of human societies on the services provided, current state, and likely future trajectory. The MA identified the failure to value ecosystem services as a major contributing cause. The 2001 environment strategy did not explicitly address environmental valuation, although the focus on poverty and environment implies a need for valuing natural resources and environmental services.

Biologically diverse ecosystems in countries served by the World Bank provide an array of valuable economic services. While the benefits of conserving ecosystems frequently outweigh the costs, conversion of these ecosystems to other uses occurs anyway, because many ecosystem benefits are of a public good nature, without markets that would reflect their real value.

The primary objective of the Southern Gobi Regional Environmental Assessment (REA) is to provide guidance for sustainable management of environmental resources in the future development of the Southern Gobi Region (SGR), development that will be led by rapid expansion of mining.