The Aichi Biodiversity Target 12 at regional level: an achievable goal?

Abstract

The Aichi Biodiversity Target 12 aims to prevent the extinction risk of known threatened species and to improve their\ud conservation status by 2020. We present the integrated strategy implemented in the last 10 years for the keystone plant\ud species of Sardinia (Italy, W. Mediterranean Basin), which includes the following activities: conservation status assessment\ud (following the IUCN protocol), ex situ conservation, in situ monitoring and active protection measures. To date, an\ud average of 51.8% of keystone plant species have been subjected to the latter first three activities while, due to the higher\ud costs, only few active conservation measures have been carried out. Considering the activities realised since 2004, we\ud have also predicted the conservation effectiveness towards 2020 and have elaborated an index to evaluate it. Halfway\ud through the strategic plan, we argue that more efforts are needed to guarantee the effective conservation of all threatened\ud plants in Sardinia

Conserving plant diversity in Europe: outcomes, criticisms and perspectives of the Habitats Directive application in Italy

“…Additionally, the high endemism rate of the Italian flora determines a significant national responsibility, at national and regional levels as previously demonstrated (e.g. Bacchetta et al 2012;Fenu et al 2015b;Rossi et al 2016).…”

“…In order to assess the effects of the conservation policies and the effectiveness of HD, the EU Commission requires the assessment of the CS of species and habitats at national and biogeographical levels, with a 6-year interval (Evans and Arvela 2011). Specifically, article 17 requires to report about the HD implementation and the conservation status of species (and habitat), and all EU Member States have full responsibility for their conservation, especially for endemic species (Bock et al 2005;Fenu et al 2015b;Rossi et al 2016).…”

A Common Approach to the Conservation of Threatened Island Vascular Plants: First Results in the Mediterranean Basin

“…Although great efforts have been made in recent years to take concrete conservation actions and develop the structures dealing with ex situ conservation, in situ conservation actions are minimal when compared to the huge number of threatened plant species. In general, there are several constraints that may hamper the realization of in situ conservation measures, such as the significant economic and time costs, the availability of optimal sites, the difficulties (or more likely impossibility) of implementing these activities on private localities, and the great uncertainty of success chiefly related to natural stochastic events [12,18,22,34,63]. These limitations are common to a wide spectrum of human-mediated conservation actions, from those that are extremely complicated, such as translocations, to less demanding ones, such as fencing (to avoid or reduce grazing and protect the most critical life-cycle step for the population survival), removing/eradicating invasive alien plants or controlling pest plants.…”

“…Despite in situ conservation actions being the best option to conserve plant diversity, ex situ conservation allows a complementary method to avoid prompt extinction [9,10,26,63]. Currently, ex situ conservation focuses on seed banking, but this strategy is inappropriate for several endangered plants; new ex situ techniques that are currently available, such as cryopreservation (and in vitro methods) and collections of living specimens, should be implemented in order to limit this gap [64].…”

“As Far as Possible and as Appropriate”: Implementing the Aichi Biodiversity Targets

“…Aspects of implementation for Target 11 have been examined in Canada (MacKinnon et al 2015), France (Meinesz & Blanfune 2015), Japan (Naoe et al 2015), and the Philippines (Mallari et al 2016). Target 12 has been examined in Italy (Fenu et al 2015). Further, despite the increasing role of nonstate actors such as environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) (Gagnon-Legare & Prestre 2014) and business (Pistorius & Freiberg 2014) in biodiversity governance, relatively little is known about how different actors within nation states are seeking to address or align their activities with the Aichi Targets.…”