Over half of the interviewees (number of interviewees, n=14) saw the recognition of areas that deliver conservation outcomes but have been excluded from the mainstream conservation agenda as the primary benefit of identifying and legally recognizing an area as an OECM; corresponding with findings from the literature (Jonas et al., 2018). In addition, interviewees mentioned that recognizing an area as an OECM entails acknowledging and embracing its governance systems and value for biodiversity, and including them in the local-to-global conservation agenda. This might provide appropriate support to these areas, increasing biodiversity monitoring and rule enforcement, leading to increased pride and empowerment within local communities. Interviewees also mentioned that being recognized might increase governance authorities’ sense of responsibility and improve their chances to attract funding from national or international bodies, such as the Global Environmental Facility, if required. Recognition could also incentivize managers to maintain their current practices over the long-term (Fig. 1). All of the above, according to the literature and subject to a range of caveats, could also increase security to both people (e.g. threat abatement, maintenance of cultural and social practices) and nature (e.g. biodiversity and ecosystem services conservation) in the area (Jonas et al., 2017).

Fig. 1.

Flowchart showing the positive impacts for nature and people of recognizing areas as an OECM; boxes and linkages drawn solely on interviewees responses. OECM recognition was suggested to lead to positive outcomes at site level, such as increased feeling of responsibility and empowerment, as well as at the system level, such as the maintenance of more diverse systems and recoupling of natural and social systems.

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Interviewees stated that increased recognition of OECMs could help engage a diversity of actors in local-to-international conservation processes (Diz et al., 2018; Kremen and Merenlender, 2018). The diverse cultural and spiritual beliefs, complex forms of governance, and management types in different OECMs might unfold in diverse conservation outcomes (Jonas et al., 2017), and improve linkages between equitable conservation and effective conservation outcomes (Hill et al., 2015; Fig. 1). Finally, interviewees said that being considered an OECM could be a solution for those communities that do not want the area they govern to become a PA but nevertheless, want recognition and/or tenure security. Recognition may also help accelerate the identification of other OECMs, which will depend largely on whether landowners, managers, civil society, and governments are interested in reporting or having their lands reported as OECMs. One interviewee recommended positive OECM case studies be created to incentivize other leaders to report their areas. Fig. 1 presents the flowchart with the consequences of recognizing these areas, from increasing sense of responsibility to the potential increase in equitability and the maintenance of diverse systems.

More than one third (n=9) of the interviewees underscored CBD Decision 14/8 (2018) and the guidance by the IUCN Task Force on OECMs (2019) that areas reported as OECMs should be of high conservation value and effective for biodiversity conservation (Fig. 2a). Interviewees stated that, because OECMs must have positive biodiversity outcomes according to its guidelines, they might on average be more effective than PA. Even though interviewees acknowledged that it might be difficult to assess the effectiveness of many of these areas, literature has documented cases where territories occupied by Indigenous peoples and local communities are more effective in conserving biodiversity than some restricted-use PA (Hayes and Ostrom, 2003; Nelson and Chomitz, 2011; Nolte et al., 2013). OECMs could also cover species and ecosystems that are not well conserved inside formal PA. For example, in Australia, almost 75% of threatened species are found within lands governed by Indigenous peoples (Renwick et al., 2017). Further, 76.5% of all unprotected Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) (IUCN, 2016) across 10 countries were in places with characteristics that resembled OECMs, such as areas governed and managed in ways to achieve sustained conservation (Donald et al., 2019).

Fig. 2.

Chord diagrams showing the main categories of responses related to the potential benefits (A), and challenges of OECMs (B). The links between themes do not show any causality between them. The width of the link between chords is proportional to the number of times both concepts were mentioned in the same interview. Different colours are only for visualization. White numbers in the chords show the number of interviewees that mentioned that theme. For instance, in A, the perception that OECMs will contribute by recognizing ‘other areas’ and the perception that they are effective appeared frequently together.

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Six interviewees highlighted that OECMs could serve the purposes of protecting high-threat regions and improving ecological representativeness, connectivity, and landscape integration. PA are known in many places for being established in areas of low threat, low value for agriculture and development and farther from roads (“high and far”; Joppa and Pfaff, 2010; Nelson and Chomitz, 2011; Fig. 2a). As a result, ecosystems in high threat areas and of high value for agriculture and development have no or little protection. Only 43% of the 821 terrestrial ecoregions identified by Olson et al. (2001) have 17% or more of their area within formal PA (UNEP-WCMC, 2018). A study showed that KBAs not under PA tend to be in places of high human population density areas. Some of these have OECM-like characteristics, such as effective management and governance types, are geographically defined and are effective for biodiversity conservation (Donald et al., 2019). Thus, OECMs could serve the purpose of protecting highly threatened regions, thereby improving the ecological representativeness of area-based conservation networks, and complementing PA coverage (Fig. 2a). Finally, an interviewee addressed the importance of OECMs for protecting areas with high ecosystem services value, such as water provision and carbon sequestration. This is important as, in many cases, areas with high biodiversity value do not overlap with areas of high ecosystem services value (Naidoo et al., 2008), and studies have shown that ecosystem services are not always being conserved inside PA (Durán et al., 2013).

To ensure OECMs are indeed representative, three interviewees suggested that guidelines for allocating future identification of OECMs are developed and tailored for a regional context, considering the specificities of each region. Prioritization methods could help define the most important areas for potential OECMs and as a result perhaps help address the ‘high and far’ issue. The KBA criteria (IUCN, 2016), which is a global standard for identifying areas of high conservation value, could be used for prioritizing the identification of OECMs. In this sense, the first candidate OECMs to be evaluated could be the ones that overlap with KBAs, thereby ensuring they will be in areas of high importance for biodiversity. Other approaches, based on self-selection, also have value.

Almost half of the interviewees (n=10) believed that areas identification and monitoring will be a challenge, and that the correct identification and effective monitoring of OECMs may determine the effectiveness of the entire area-based network (Fig. 2b). The recognition of areas with characteristics that do not meet the IUCN OECM guidelines (2019), or fear that countries will not follow the guidelines appropriately, could lead to the incorporation of sites of low biodiversity value. Interviewees (n=2) mentioned that if many sites of low biodiversity value are recognized and incorporated as OECM, there might be a trade-off between the creation of OECMs and PA, as few will continue to invest in the latter (Fig. 2b), also mentioned in Dudley and Stolton (2020). On the other hand, three interviewees believed that the criteria for recognizing OECMs are too strict, and might exclude areas with potential for contributing to biodiversity conservation but that do not meet all the IUCN guidelines criteria. Problems with identification have already been described in the literature. Lemieux et al. (2019) suggest that, in Canada, some of the declared OECMs do not meet the guidelines` standards as they are not commited to long-term conservation (Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 2017).

Interviewees identified three aspects that could increase the challenge of monitoring OECMs (Fig. 2b): (i) lack of monitoring tools; (ii) variation in governance; and (iii) lack of funding. First, there is no standard way of measuring effectiveness, and even though some of the remote sensing products based on land coverage might continue to be the most comprehensive tool for monitoring, there was a concern that they are an insufficient proxy for biodiversity and do not capture more subtle forms of ecosystem degradation (e.g. empty forest syndrome (Redford, 1992)). Some of the most robust studies on effectiveness using remote sense information are counterfactual assessments based on tools such as matching analysis (Schleicher et al., 2019).

Other monitoring alternatives are PA management evaluation tools (Protected Area Management Effectiveness – PAME) and ground monitoring. However, the former does not necessarily indicate effectiveness of protection, and the latter can be too expensive and difficult to develop for larger areas (Carranza et al., 2014). Second, there was no consensus among interviewees as to how different types of governance would impact robust and accurate monitoring. As local context is likely to influence the conditions that promote conservation within a certain type of governance, areas with similar governance regimes in different regions could have varied threats, effectiveness and thus need different monitoring systems. Moreover, because some potential OECMs are privately governed, the implementation of monitoring would largely depend on the commitment of the landowner.

Finally, some countries might have no resources to identify, recognize, report, or monitor OECMs which, according to interviewees, are expected to be smaller but more numerous than PA as they might include private areas, traditional community areas, and others that are generally smaller than formal PA. According to one interviewee, more collaboration between institutions for coordinating efforts and capacity building may be required due to the potentially large numbers and varied governance types of OECMs.

Interviewees suggested that the KBAs identification process could be a potential tool to help guide monitoring. KBAs purpose is to identify sites that have important features for the persistence of biodiversity (IUCN, 2016) and each site is evaluated in a threshold-based system to its importance to one or more biodiversity elements (KBA Standards and Appeals Committee, 2019). Thus, KBAs identification process and its associated monitoring processes could contribute for monitoring in two ways: first by targeting monitoring efforts on the elements for which that specific KBA was identified. Many OECMs might not have a conservation goal, and it is important that monitoring is focused on specific targets; second by assuring monitoring will be established, as the KBA consortium requires evaluation and vigilance, as each KBA has to be re-evaluated every 8–12 years according to the permanence of biodiversity (IUCN, 2016). Further, there are many forms of low-cost monitoring already being implemented inside KBAs, through citizen science or community-based monitoring (Maxwell et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2018).

One third of the interviewees (n=8) expressed concern that OECMs could exacerbate an unhelpful focus on the percentage coverage element of Aichi Target 11 and of any areas-based target(s) in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Work in other contexts shows that there is a clear risk of indicators becoming targets in themselves, whether or not they are actually good indicators of the targets they are assumed to measure – a phenomenon known as Godhart’s law (Godhart, 1975). The concern here is that countries may aim to meet their coverage targets by designating large PA or OECMs in places with low opportunity costs and marginal conservation benefits, rather than focusing on delivering meaningful biodiversity conservation in places that could provide greater additionality to the existing area-based conservation network. In this case, elements such as biodiversity, which require more complex monitoring and evaluation tools, would be underestimated, and the quality of the areas would be jeopardized (Barnes, 2015). Interviewees believed that OECMs, together with low-value PA, could be used as a way to increase de jure coverage without increasing de facto protection, a concern also expressed in the literature (Barnes et al., 2018; Visconti et al., 2019).

Interviewees described potential consequences of the recognition of low-value areas: i) small areas important for biodiversity, but with high values for agriculture, would remain unprotected; ii) the recognition of other, more effective PA and OECMs might be disincentivized, as governments could argue that sufficient area coverage has already been achieved; iii) the budget for the designation and monitoring of other, more effective areas would be diluted (Giglio et al., 2018). For instance, in Brazil two very large marine PA (protection status VI from IUCN) were created in remote areas in 2018 (ICMBio, 2018). This prompted concerns that these areas could be used to show that Brazil has reached its target for marine protection (10%), even though the designation of these areas has low restriction and might not be effective for conservation. Note, however, that this example illustrates that the risk of inflating progress towards protection targets is not exclusive to OECMs.