Abstract page
Abstract: Recent agreements have strengthened and expanded
ongoing international commitments to protect and restore native
habitats. Nevertheless, how such commitments should be implemented has
been historically controversial, and nuances in ongoing debates are
often misunderstood, hindering biodiversity conservation. We propose
three unequivocal principles that must be central to how area-based
biodiversity conservation will occur in the coming decades. These
principles relate to habitat coverage, amount, and connectivity, and
their enunciation clarifies apparent contradictions in the literature.
We explain why socio-economic considerations that are central to current
biodiversity conservation cannot override these principles. Biodiversity
must be supported everywhere on Earth, especially when considering the
right of human population to access nature and to benefit from countless
ecosystem services.