BRONX, NY, September 12, 2026—A new international study has found that achieving global biodiversity and climate goals will require more than expanding protected areas alone. By comparing how different approaches to conserving land perform in protecting forests and reducing carbon emissions, researchers found that protected areas remain the most effective tool for preventing deforestation, while Indigenous lands and other effective conservation measures can make important complementary contributions.
Published today in Nature Communications, the study provides one of the most comprehensive evaluations to date of how different conservation approaches perform across tropical forest landscapes. The findings offer governments new scientific evidence as they work toward the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity, including its Target 3, which calls for conserving and effectively managing at least 30 percent of the world’s terrestrial, inland water, coastal, and marine areas by 2030.
Rather than focusing solely on whether an area has a particular conservation designation, the researchers examined a broader question: which approaches to governing land consistently deliver measurable conservation outcomes. Their analysis compared protected areas, Indigenous lands, conservation-oriented forest concessions, logging concessions, and mining concessions, providing new evidence on how different governance approaches contribute to conserving forests and reducing carbon emissions.
“The global biodiversity crisis demands that we use every effective conservation tool available,” said Kendall Jones, Director of Ecosystem Science and Planning at the Wildlife Conservation Society and a co-author of the study. “Protected areas remain the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation, but our findings show that a diversity of well-governed approaches—including many led by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities—can complement protected areas and help countries meet global biodiversity and climate goals.”
The study combined a global assessment of human pressure across protected areas and Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs)—areas outside formal protected areas that nevertheless achieve long-term biodiversity conservation—with a detailed analysis of forest loss across the Peruvian Amazon between 2005 and 2021. By accounting for differences in where conservation areas are located, the researchers were able to compare how effectively different conservation approaches reduced deforestation and associated carbon emissions.
In the Peruvian Amazon, protected areas were the most effective approach for preventing forest loss, avoiding roughly half of the deforestation expected in comparable unprotected landscapes. The researchers also found that Indigenous lands and conservation-oriented non-timber forest product concessions significantly reduced both deforestation and carbon emissions, demonstrating that multiple conservation approaches can produce measurable biodiversity and climate benefits. In contrast, logging concessions and mining concessions were associated with greater forest loss and carbon emissions than comparable unmanaged areas, underscoring that conservation outcomes depend not simply on legal designation but on how landscapes are governed and managed.
The study also evaluated the global network of existing declared OECMs and found that, while these areas generally experience higher human pressure than the world’s most strictly protected areas, they nevertheless maintain substantially lower levels of human pressure than unprotected landscapes. Many individual OECMs exhibited very low levels of human disturbance, reinforcing their potential to complement protected areas as countries expand conservation efforts under the Global Biodiversity Framework.
The findings underscore that conservation outcomes depend not only on how much land is recognized for conservation, but also on how effectively those lands are governed and managed over time. The authors conclude that evaluating conservation performance—and investing in approaches that consistently deliver measurable benefits for biodiversity and climate—will be essential as governments work to achieve Target 3 and other targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
“Countries have many pathways for conserving nature, and this research shows the importance of recognizing those that demonstrably work,” said Germán Forero-Medina, Scientific Director for WCS’s Andes, Amazon, and Orinoco Region and a co-author of the study. “Protected areas remain indispensable, but Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and other conservation partners are also demonstrating how well-managed landscapes can conserve biodiversity while helping address climate change. Building on these complementary strengths will be essential to achieving global biodiversity goals.”
“A key next step is to move beyond asking whether different conservation approaches work on average and understand where, when, and under what social and ecological conditions they are most effective,” said Pablo Negret, lead author of the study. “Our future research will focus on identifying these conditions and on understanding how different conservation mechanisms can be strategically combined across landscapes. Ultimately, we want to provide governments and conservation practitioners with evidence that helps them direct limited resources toward the places and approaches where they can achieve the greatest benefits for biodiversity, climate, and people.”
The authors emphasize that no single conservation approach will be sufficient on its own. Instead, they argue that protected areas and other effective conservation measures should be viewed as complementary components of a broader conservation strategy, supported by long-term monitoring, adequate financing, and effective governance. They also recommend developing consistent approaches for evaluating conservation outcomes so that countries can identify and strengthen the approaches that deliver the greatest benefits for biodiversity and climate.