Abstract
Selecting biodiversity indicators to report national and subnational progress towards the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is a major challenge, one made even more urgent by the fast-approaching 2030 targets. To identify appropriate indicators, the selection process must be streamlined, while remaining transparent, effective, and with the active engagement of stakeholders from the academic, public, and private sectors. We present guidelines for the selection of biodiversity indicators to track progress towards 2030 targets in the context of the GBF, with a case study of the province-level indicator recommendation process for Quebec's 2030 Nature Plan. We outline six steps to develop a shortlist of indicators that are relevant to targets, fulfill minimum criteria of scientific quality given available biodiversity data, and practical to inform decisions and on-the-ground conservation actions. We present the rationale and outcomes of this selection process, culminating in 15 biodiversity indicators that we recommended for Quebec's 2030 Nature Plan. Going forward, we recommend continuing to build trust across sectors, developing communication guidelines to standardise indicator reporting, and testing indicator performance at national and subnational scales. Overall, this case study demonstrates that with active engagement and cooperation, we can rapidly rise to the challenge of identifying the indicators we need to track biodiversity change.
Introduction
Adopted by 196 countries, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets 23 global biodiversity targets for 2030 to progress towards four long-term goals by 2050 (CBD 2022b). All parties must develop their strategies to meet the GBF targets, which includes implementing the Monitoring Framework of the GBF (CBD 2022a; Affinito et al. 2024). At the heart of the GBF is a biodiversity monitoring framework that relies on indicators (CBD 2022a), which are measures of change in the state of biodiversity through time to track progress towards targets (Jones et al. 2011). A national or subnational Monitoring Framework requires the selection and reporting of a suite of biodiversity indicators that can be selected from 36 headline indicators, 71 component indicators, 266 complementary indicators, 15 binary indicators, and national indicators (Affinito et al. 2024). Many governments are now facing the challenge of quickly sorting through this extensive list to report indicators that are well suited to their ecological and socioeconomic priorities and tailored to the available data from their own monitoring schemes, while remaining linked to global biodiversity assessments.
This challenge is particularly complex due to the urgency of choosing a shortlist of indicators within the tight timeframe set by the GBF's 2030 targets. Selecting indicators at this fast pace is particularly difficult given our uncertainty about their power to detect change at national and subnational scales, as biodiversity changes like species losses may be less perceptible at these scales. Beyond this, the methodology for many proposed indicators is not yet publicly available for national assessments. This limits our understanding of how these indicators can be disaggregated to detect progress at subnational scales, given the limitations of data availability and resolution at subnational scales. Despite this lack of information, the fast-approaching 2030 deadline imposes streamlining of the indicator selection process so that monitoring can be developed, implemented, and operationalised as quickly as possible.
To efficiently monitor biodiversity and inform policies and decisions, we need a cohesive set of indicators that are collectively informative (Noss 1990; Sparks et al. 2011), and importantly, relevant to the biodiversity targets they are intended to measure. Biodiversity change is multidimensional and scale-dependent (Chase et al. 2018), and therefore must be monitored with a suite of indicators that cover multiple dimensions of biodiversity and different spatial scales (Perino et al. 2022). It is then critical to assemble a balanced set of indicators that measure different aspects of biodiversity change, as well as the pressures driving these changes, nature's contributions to people, and the policy actions that are intended to halt or reverse these changes (Butchart et al. 2010; Sparks et al. 2011; Burgess et al. 2024). Taken together, a set of indicators should be composed of distinct metrics, which capture these multiple measures of progress with minimal redundancy (Martínez-Jauregui et al. 2021; Stevenson et al. 2024). The indicator suite must also be parsimonious to remain cost-effective (Rice and Rochet 2005; Leung and Gonzalez 2024), particularly in contexts where data and resource constraints may be restricting (Bhatt et al. 2020). Within this suite, each indicator should then have three key properties: relevance to the target(s) they are intended to measure, scientific quality (i.e., reasonable accuracy, uncertainty, and transparency), and practicality for decision-support and conservation action.
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