Establishing Protected Areas (PAs) is among the most common conservation interventions. Protecting areas from the threats posed by human activity will by definition inhibit some human actions. However, adverse impacts could be balanced by maintaining ecosystem services or introducing new livelihood options. Consequently there is an ongoing debate on whether the net impact of PAs on human well-being at local or regional scales is positive or negative. We report here on a systematic review of evidence for impacts on human well-being arising from the establishment and maintenance of terrestrial PAs.

Extinct in the Wild (EW) species are placed at the highest risk of extinction under the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, but the extent and variation in this risk have never been evaluated. Harnessing global databases of ex situ animal and plant holdings, we report on the perilous state of EW species. Most EW animal species—already compromised by their small number of founders—are maintained at population sizes far below the thresholds necessary to ensure demographic security. Most EW plant species depend on live propagation by a small number of botanic gardens, with a minority secured at seed bank institutions. Both extinctions and recoveries are possible fates for EW species. We urgently call for international effort to enable the latter.

The continuing decline and loss of biodiversity has caused an increase in the use of interventionist conservation tools, such as translocation. However, many translocation attempts fail to establish viable populations, with poor release site selection often flagged as an inhibitor of success. We used species distribution models (SDMs) to predict the climate suitability of 102 release sites for amphibians, reptiles, and terrestrial insects and compared suitability predictions between successful and failed attempts. We then quantified the importance of climate suitability relative to 5 other variables frequently considered in the literature as important determinants of translocation success: number of release years, number of individuals released, life stage released, origin of the source population, and position of the release site relative to the species’ range. Probability of translocation success increased as predicted climate suitability increased and this effect was the strongest among the variables we considered, accounting for 48.3% of the variation in translocation outcome. These findings should encourage greater consideration of climate suitability when selecting release sites for conservation translocations and we advocate the use of SDMs as an effective way to do this.