Habitat Protection Indexes - new monitoring measures for the conservation of coastal and marine habitats

A worldwide call to implement habitat protection aims to halt biodiversity loss. To monitor the extent of coastal and marine habitats within protected areas (PAs) in a standardized, open source, and reproducible way, we constructed the Local and the Global Habitat Protection Indexes (LHPI and GHPI, respectively). The LHPI pinpoints the jurisdictions with the greatest opportunity to expand their own PAs, while the GHPI showcases which jurisdictions contribute the most in area to the protection of these habitats globally. Jurisdictions were evaluated to understand which have the highest opportunity to contribute globally to the protection of habitats by meeting a target of 30% coverage of PAs with Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) having the greatest opportunity to do so. While we focus on marine and coastal habitats, our workflow can be extended to terrestrial and freshwater habitats. These indexes are useful to monitor aspects of Sustainable Development Goal 14 and the emerging post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, to understand the current status of international cooperation on coastal and marine habitats conservation.