Ocean Data Viewer

Decision
The CBD Programme of Work on Protected Areas
Datasets Covered

Summary
The PoWPA signifies the greatest international community commitment to protected areas to date. It provides a framework for cooperation between Governments, donors, NGOs and local communities in order to develop a participatory, ecologically representative and effectively managed national and regional system of protected areas. Protected areas are increasingly growing in size and scope, sparking greater regional efforts and transboundary management plans to ensure the scale of protective measures meets the ecological requirements for function and sustainability. Governments have committed to international and national targets for conservation through the creation of national systems of protected areas. The central role of protected areas in implementing the objectives of the Convention has been repeatedly emphasized in decisions of the Conference of Parties.

Established
COP 7 – February 2004

Key Points
According to 2009 Millennium Development Goal statistics for protected area coverage, the global protected-area network covers around 11 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and 6 per cent of the territorial seas. Less than 1 per cent of the Earth’s marine area, including areas beyond national jurisdiction, is covered.

The present programme of work on protected areas features goals and activities that contain elements of existing programmes of work on forests, inland waters, dry and sub-humid lands, coastal and marine and mountain biological diversity as well as the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and the Global Taxonomy Initiative. Each Party has global and regional commitments to protected areas and having access to the best available data and data management systems helps ensure the obligations are met.

Links
For further information, see the CBD PoWPA website at www.cbd.int/protected/pow

Tools in partnership with UNEP-WCMC

Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool
IBAT for business is an innovative tool designed to facilitate access to accurate and up-to-date biodiversity information to support critical business decisions. The tool is the result of a ground-breaking conservation partnership among BirdLife International, Conservation International, International Union for Conservation of Nature and UNEP-WCMC.

Coral Reef Watch
The Coral Reef Watch mission is to utilize remote sensing and in situ tools for near-real-time and long term monitoring, modeling and reporting of physical environmental conditions of coral reef ecosystems.
Protected Planet
This new interactive website provides data from the World Database on Protected Areas, a partnership between UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, and presents it in combination with other data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Wikipedia, Flickr, and Panoramio. It also provides statistics about protected areas by country.

2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (2010 BIP)
The 2010 BIP, hosted by UNEP-WCMC, is a global initiative to track progress towards achieving the CBD’s “2010 biodiversity target” to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. The Partnership brings together many international organizations working on indicators, to provide the best available information on biodiversity trends.
Habitat Validation Tool
This tool allows basic editing and validation of coastal habitat data and is being tested with the Global Distribution of Coral Reefs (2010) and the African subset of the USGS Global Distribution of Mangrove (2000) dataset. This tool will ultimately improve the accuracy of coastal habitat datasets supporting better decision-making. It forms part of our work under the Better Data, Better Decisions Initiative.

Coral Disease Database
The first version of the GCDD was launched in 2000 and was populated with some 2000 points of data from 155 references, mostly peer reviewed scientific literature. more.
Global Island Database
The Global Island Database aims to enhance the participation and role of islands in international decision-making through identifying and bringing together existing sources of data and information relevant to island systems, and presenting new analyses to aid resource managers and decision-making.

GRAME Database
In support of a proposed UN Regular Process for the Global Reporting and Assessment of the Marine Environment, including Socio-Economic Aspects, this is a searchable database of over 1000 relevant assessments, scientific research studies and data holdings at a range of scales.