Tracking Biodiversity: Monitoring at Local to Global Scales

Every species lost, every ecosystem degraded, represents a permanent change to the living fabric of Earth. But before we can protect biodiversity, we must first understand what we have – and what we’re losing. Biodiversity monitoring, the systematic process of tracking species, habitats, and ecosystems across different geographic scales, is the backbone of any meaningful conservation effort. From a local wetland survey to a global assessment of threatened ecosystems, monitoring connects scientific data to policy action. This post explores how that monitoring happens, from the international frameworks that set the agenda to the ground-level strategies countries like India are putting in place.

Biodiversity monitoring frameworks: the role of CBD and the Aichi targets 🔗

The foundation of global biodiversity monitoring rests on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), widely regarded as the most significant multilateral agreement on the protection of life on Earth. Adopted in 1992, the CBD now has 196 signatory nations and sets out three core objectives: the conservation of biodiversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.

To translate these objectives into measurable outcomes, the CBD’s Conference of Parties adopted the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 at its tenth meeting in Nagoya, Japan. This plan introduced the Aichi Biodiversity Targets – a set of 20 specific goals organized under five strategic objectives. These ranged from reducing habitat loss and controlling invasive species to expanding protected area coverage and integrating biodiversity into national planning processes.

The Aichi Targets were designed to be implemented at global, regional, national, and subnational levels, giving countries flexibility in how they chose to meet them. This flexibility was intentional – the CBD does not impose compulsory obligations but instead sets broad policy goals and lets countries determine their own implementation pathways. The targets provided a shared language for biodiversity monitoring: a common yardstick against which national progress could be compared and reported.

Despite the ambition behind the Aichi framework, the results at the end of the 2020 deadline were sobering. According to the Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, none of the 20 Aichi Targets were fully achieved at the global level. Six were partially met, while others showed limited or no measurable progress. This outcome revealed a critical gap not just in conservation action, but in the monitoring systems needed to track that action reliably. Research published in npj Biodiversity found that nearly half of the commitments countries recorded in national planning documents never appeared in subsequent progress reports – pointing to a systemic problem with how biodiversity data is gathered, reported, and verified.

In response, nations adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) at COP15 in December 2022. This successor framework sets four long-term goals for 2050 and 23 action targets for 2030, including the widely known “30×30” commitment – protecting at least 30% of the world’s land and ocean areas by 2030. Crucially, the KM-GBF also introduced a formal monitoring architecture for the first time, with headline, component, and complementary indicators to track progress continuously.

India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) 🔗

India’s approach to biodiversity conservation at the national scale is guided by its National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP). As one of the world’s 17 megadiverse nations – home to around 7-8% of all recorded species on just 2.4% of the Earth’s surface – India’s biodiversity planning carries global significance.

India’s formal NBSAP journey began in 1999, followed by the National Biodiversity Action Plan (NBAP) of 2008, which aligned with national environmental policy and later updated in 2014 to integrate the Aichi Targets. India adopted a multi-pronged conservation strategy that included designating national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, biosphere reserves, and ecologically fragile zones, as well as ex-situ measures such as gene banks for preserving genetic material outside natural habitats.

The most recent milestone came in October 2024, when India released its updated NBSAP at COP16 in Cali, Colombia. India’s updated plan sets 23 national biodiversity targets aligned with the KM-GBF’s global framework, structured under six broad conservation domains.

Key themes of India’s updated NBSAP 🔗

India’s updated NBSAP organizes its 23 national targets around three major themes. The first – reducing threats to biodiversity – addresses direct pressures such as land and sea use changes, pollution, overexploitation of species, climate change, and invasive alien species. It also includes restoring degraded ecosystems and developing wildlife corridors to reduce habitat fragmentation and support species movement.

The second theme focuses on meeting people’s needs through sustainable use and benefit-sharing, covering agriculture, fisheries, forests, and animal husbandry. This reflects India’s recognition that biodiversity conservation cannot be separated from the livelihoods of communities that depend on natural resources. The third theme addresses the enabling conditions needed for implementation – financial mechanisms, governance structures, data systems, and institutional capacity.

A standout feature of the updated plan is its commitment to inclusive participation. The process involved 21 central ministries and consultations with state-level bodies, local communities, women, youth, and other stakeholders. This “whole-of-government, whole-of-society” approach is intended to ensure biodiversity governance reaches from national policy down to the local level. India’s three-tier institutional structure – the National Biodiversity Authority, State Biodiversity Boards, and local Biodiversity Management Committees – provides the administrative spine for implementation.

On financing, India spent approximately ₹32,200 crore on biodiversity protection between 2017-18 and 2021-22, with projected annual expenditure rising to ₹81,664 crore through 2029-30. The Biodiversity Finance Plan accompanying the NBSAP outlines solutions including augmented public finance, corporate social responsibility contributions, ecological fiscal transfers, and access and benefit-sharing mechanisms.

Global efforts for biodiversity conservation 🔗

Alongside national strategies, several international instruments provide the technical and legal scaffolding for biodiversity conservation at the global scale.

The Nagoya Protocol and access to genetic resources 🔗

One of the CBD’s most important supplementary agreements is the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing, adopted in 2010 and entered into force in 2014. The protocol provides a transparent legal framework for implementing the CBD’s third objective – ensuring that benefits from the use of genetic resources are shared fairly and equitably with the countries and communities from which those resources originate. This is particularly significant for biodiversity-rich nations like India, where genetic resources have historically been accessed without adequate benefit-sharing.

The IUCN Red List: assessing species and ecosystems 🔗

At the species level, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the conservation status of plants, animals, and fungi. It classifies species into categories – Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct in the Wild, and Extinct – based on quantitative criteria including rates of population decline, geographic range, and probability of extinction.

More recently, the IUCN extended this approach to entire ecosystems through the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE). Launched formally in 2014, the RLE applies a parallel set of criteria to assess the risk of ecosystem collapse – treating “collapse” as the ecosystem-level analogue of species extinction. The RLE evaluates ecosystems across five criteria: rates of decline in geographic distribution, restricted distributions with ongoing threats, rates of abiotic (non-living) environmental degradation, biotic disruption, and quantitative estimates of collapse risk.

The RLE has now assessed over 4,000 ecosystems across more than 60 countries and has been adopted as a headline indicator in the KM-GBF monitoring framework. Ecosystem types are categorized as Collapsed (CO), Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN), Vulnerable (VU), Near Threatened (NT), or Least Concern (LC) – giving policymakers, land-use planners, and investors a standardized tool for understanding which ecosystems are most at risk and why. Together, the Red List of Species and the Red List of Ecosystems provide complementary windows into biodiversity loss: one focused on individual organisms, the other on the habitats and ecological processes that sustain them.

Challenges and progress in biodiversity monitoring 🔗

Despite the sophistication of international frameworks, biodiversity monitoring faces persistent structural challenges that limit what we actually know about the state of life on Earth.

Data gaps and taxonomic bias 🔗

Monitoring systems tend to focus on well-studied groups – vertebrates, particularly mammals and birds – while vast swathes of biodiversity, including invertebrates, fungi, and soil microorganisms, remain poorly documented. Geographic bias compounds this problem: data from tropical regions in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America – where biodiversity is highest and threats most acute – is often far less comprehensive than data from North America and Europe. This means global assessments are inevitably built on an uneven foundation.

The gap between commitment and implementation 🔗

One of the most consistent findings in global biodiversity governance is the gap between what countries commit to and what they report achieving. Analysis of national planning documents from CBD member states shows that commitments made in biodiversity strategies frequently do not appear in subsequent national progress reports. The problem is especially pronounced for targets that require significant institutional change – those that demand coordination across government ministries, shifts in economic incentives, or reforms to land-use governance. Self-identified megadiverse countries showed somewhat higher rates of reported success, but even among this group, the overall picture fell short of targets.

The importance of data sharing and cross-scale collaboration 🔗

Effective biodiversity monitoring cannot happen in silos. Connecting local observations – a community survey of bird populations, a citizen science record of flowering plants – to national inventories and ultimately to global assessments requires robust data infrastructure, standardized methodologies, and genuine political will to share information across borders and institutions.

Platforms like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) are central to this effort, aggregating species occurrence data from thousands of institutions worldwide and making it freely accessible for research and policy. Similarly, the CBD’s Clearing-House Mechanism facilitates information exchange between parties. The KM-GBF’s monitoring framework represents a significant step forward in formalizing these linkages – specifying not just what outcomes are desired, but how progress toward them will be tracked using consistent, comparable indicators across countries.

The challenge going forward is ensuring that monitoring is not just a reporting exercise but a tool that genuinely drives adaptive management – so that when data shows biodiversity declining, conservation strategies can be revised in time to make a difference.

What do you think? Given that no Aichi Biodiversity Target was fully achieved by 2020 despite broad international commitment, what structural changes do you think are most urgently needed – in monitoring systems, governance, or financing – to ensure the Kunming-Montreal framework delivers better outcomes? And how can countries like India, with enormous biodiversity and complex governance challenges, ensure that national targets translate into real, measurable change at the local level?

References

1. https://www.cbd.int/sp/targets
2. https://earth.org/what-are-the-aichi-biodiversity-targets/
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11332214/
4. https://abs.nls.ac.in/?p=798
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2070401
6. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/wildlife-biodiversity/dte-at-cop16-indias-nbsap-indicates-countrys-plans-to-tackle-issues-of-biodiversity-loss
7. https://www.manoramayearbook.in/current-affairs/india/2024/11/04/india-nbsap-biodiversity.html
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Biological_Diversity
9. https://iucn.org/resources/conservation-tool/iucn-red-list-ecosystems
10. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44185-024-00039-5