Convention on Biological Diversity adopts indicator to track conservation of useful plants

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Convention on Biological Diversity adopts indicator to track conservation of useful plants

The Biodiversity Indicators Partnership formally adopted a new indicator in July to monitor progress in the conservation of thousands of economically and culturally important plants. Developed by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture and the Crop Trust, the indicator helps to assess progress towards the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Aichi Biodiversity Target 13, which includes maintaining the genetic diversity of cultivated plants, their wild relatives and other plants of socio-economic and cultural value. This measure is also considered a relevant indicator for objective 2.5 of sustainable development. But based on the very low average score of plants in the index - about 3 out of 100 - the indicator shows that there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve the conservation objective.

"The formal adoption of this indicator is exciting because the tool provides clear information on the conservation status of valuable plants and measures that decision-makers can use to understand how close they are to achieving their objectives," said Colin Khoury, biodiversity specialist at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), a global research organization based in Colombia. "This tool will help policy makers and conservation specialists around the world to better understand which plants need priority protection and how countries and the planet as a whole are taking care of them.

First published online by CIAT in 2018, the Useful Plants Indicator scores nearly 7,000 wild useful plants from 220 countries on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 of which are fully protected. Any plant of 75 or more is "sufficiently preserved". Ratings 74-50, 49-25 and 24-0, respectively, reflect a low, medium and high priority for conservation. The indicator also weighs in situ plant conservation - in protected areas such as national parks - and ex situ conservation, which covers protected plants in gene banks, botanical gardens and other conservation repositories.

The indicator shows that a wide range of wild plants used for food, medicines, shelter, fuel, livestock fodder and other useful purposes are at risk. These include wild populations of firs used for Christmas trees, original types of staple foods for kitchen cabinets such as vanilla, chamomile, cocoa and cinnamon, wild plants related to crops such as coffee and uncultivated plants used by bees to produce honey.

The research underlying the tool was published in 2018 in Ecological Indicators. For more information on the study, please consult the press release here.

The CBD was signed by 150 government leaders at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and is dedicated to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. The indicator is part of the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (BIP), a global initiative to promote the development and use of the CBD, SDG and other indicators to measure biodiversity. More information on the adoption of the indicator can be found on the BIP website here.