Area-based conservation is essential to safeguard nature’s diversity. In view of expanding human land use, increasing climate change and unmet conservation targets, area-based conservation requires efficiency and effectiveness more than ever. In this review, I identify and relate pressing challenges to promising opportunities for effective and efficient protected area governance and management, to enhance research, decision-making and capacity building in area-based conservation under uncertain future developments. I reveal that protected area management is particularly challenged by human land use, climate change, invasive species, and social, political and economic limitations. Protected area management often lacks the continuous availability of data on current states and trends of nature and threats. Biocultural conservation, climate-smart management and biosecurity approaches help to overcome challenges induced by human needs, climate change and invasive species, respectively. Economic valuation and shifts in funding priorities can boost protected area effectiveness and efficiency. In-situ monitoring techniques, remote sensing and open data infrastructures can fill data and information gaps for protected area planning and management. Moreover, adaptive management is an auspicious concept in the framework of systematic conservation planning to ensure the enduring effectiveness of protected areas despite unpredictable future developments. Post-2020 international biodiversity and sustainable development goals could be met earlier if protected areas were more effective. I consequently conclude with the need for a global information system that is to support area-based conservation by synthesizing challenges and opportunities for protected area management effectiveness and efficiency at the local to global level.

Protected areas (PA) are refugia of biodiversity. However, anthropogenic climate change induces a redistribution of life on Earth that affects the effectiveness of PAs. When species are forced to migrate from protected to unprotected areas to track suitable climate, they often face degraded habitats in human-dominated landscapes and a higher extinction threat. Here, we assess how climate conditions are expected to shift within the world’s terrestrial PAs (n = 137,432). PAs in the temperate and northern high-latitude biomes are predicted to obtain especially high area proportions of climate conditions that are novel within the PA network at the local, regional and global scale by the end of this century. These PAs are predominantly small, at low elevation, with low environmental heterogeneity, high human pressure, and low biotic uniqueness. Our results guide adaptation measures towards PAs that are strongly affected by climate change, and of low adaption capacity and high conservation value.

Biogeographical units are widely adopted in ecological research and nature conservation management, even though biogeographical regionalisation is still under scientific debate. The European Environment Agency provided an official map of the European Biogeographical Regions (EBRs), which contains the official boundaries used in the Habitats and Birds Directives. However, these boundaries bisect cells in the official EU 10 km × 10 km grid used for many purposes, including reporting species and habitat data, meaning that 6881 cells overlap two or more regions. Therefore, superimposing the EBRs vector map over the grid creates ambiguities in associating some cells with European Biogeographical Regions. To provide an operational tool to unambiguously define the boundaries of the eleven European Biogeographical Regions, we provide a specifically developed raster map of Grid-Based European Biogeographical Regions (GB-EBRs). In this new map, the borders of the EBRs are reshaped to coherently match the standard European 10 km × 10 km grid imposed for reporting tasks by Article 17 of the Habitats Directive and used for many other datasets. We assign each cell to the EBR with the largest area within the cell.

Protected areas (PAs) constitute major tools in nature conservation. In the European Union (EU), the Birds and Habitats Directives are the most important policies for conservation strategy, legally preserving Europe’s characteristic, rare, endemic and threatened biota. We used occurrence data for species listed in the directives’ Annexes to assess the uniqueness of major PAs in the EU (National Parks, Biosphere Reserves); this is important for preserving the EU’s focal species. We developed a novel, multifunctional approach to calculate different metrics of conservation value that represent different components of species diversity within the PAs, involving inventory diversity, deviation from the species–area relationship, species rarity and differentiation diversity. Applying it, we found that individual PAs frequently vary considerably in their scores on different components, which are often disconnected from PA size. PAs around the EU periphery, often containing few species, are key to conserving species that are rare in the EU. Because our analysis focuses on EU priority species and includes different components of diversity, it allows more appropriate estimation of conservation value inside PAs in context of the EU than recent, high-profile, global-level research. We offer tools to evaluate, and information to regulate, the representativeness, persistence and efficiency of PAs.

Aim: Protected areas are essential to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem benefits to society under increasing human pressures of the Anthropocene. Anthropogenic climate change, however, threatens the enduring effectiveness of protected areas in conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services, because it modifies and redistributes biodiversity with unknown consequences for ecosystem functioning within protected areas. Here, we assess (a) the climate change exposure of the global terrestrial protected area estate and (b) the climate change vulnerability of national protected area estates.Location: Terrestrial protected areas worldwide.Methods: We calculated local climate change exposure as predicted climate anomalies between the present and 2070 using ten global climate models, two emission scenarios (RCP 4.5 and 8.5) and the finest spatial resolution available for global climate projections (approx. 1 km). We estimated the climate change vulnerability of national protected area estates by analysing countrywide relationships between protected areas’ climate anomalies and other protected area characteristics, that is area, elevation, terrain ruggedness, human footprint and irreplaceability for globally threatened species.Results: We found predicted climate anomalies highest in protected areas of (sub‐)tropical countries. The correlations between climate anomalies and protected area characteristics strongly differ between countries. Globally, protected areas showing large climate anomalies tend to be at high elevation and highly irreplaceable for threatened species, increasing climate change vulnerability. These protected areas are relatively large in area, of high topographic heterogeneity and less pressured by humans, decreasing climate change vulnerability.Main conclusion: This study reveals potential hotspots of climate change impact inside the terrestrial protected area estate. It thus supports and guides climate‐smart conservation policy and management, particularly national to local authorities, to ensure the future effectiveness of protected areas in preserving biodiversity and ecosystem benefits under climate change.

Protecting global biodiversity is one of the most urgent tasks for the coming decades. Area-based conservation is a pillar for preserving ecosystems and species. Strictly protected areas specifically preserve biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The “EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030” targets strict protection for 10% of land area. Here we performed the first analysis of strictly protected areas (as IUCN type Ia, Ib, and II) across Europe, by investigating their area coverage at the level of biogeographical regions, countries and elevation gradients. We show that, with few exceptions, the amount of strictly protected area is very limited and the spatial distribution of such protected areas is biased towards higher elevation sites, as in the case of other protected areas. Then, we suggest that potential areas should be identified to expand strictly protected areas with low economic and social costs including, for instance, areas with high biodiversity value, low population, and low productive land use. Finally, we propose that a coordinated effort and a strategic plan to achieve continental-scale conservation are fundamental, and at least half of this land under strict conservation (i.e. 5%) should be under the protection categories Ia and Ib.