Indicator Code: CRI
Objective: Ecosystem Vitality
Policy Category: Biodiversity and Habitat
Subcategory: Biodiversity and Habitat
Indicator Short Name: Conservation Risk Index
Indicator Full Name: Ratio of Protected to Converted Lands
Indicator Description: The Conservation Risk Index measures the ratio of protected to converted lands and is calculated by WWF biome within each country. It compares the area of each biome in the country that is under protection to the area of each biome that has been converted to other land uses (e.g., from forests to cropland). This indicator is a more comprehensive measure of whether countries are protecting their natural environment on the same spatial scale as habitats are being converted.
Units: Ratio
Country Coverage: 205
Reference Year: 2006 for protected areas, 2000 for land cover
Target: 0.5
Target Source: Expert Judgment
Short Source: The Conservation Strategies Division of The Nature Conservancy calculated this indicator based on third party source data.
Source: Calculations by Timothy Boucher of the Conservation Strategies Division, The Nature Conservancy, based on these data sets:
UNEP-WCMC (United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Center). (2007). Global Protected Areas Data Set extracted from the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) in August 2007 by UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WDPA custodian) (www.unep-wcmc.org), Cambridge, UK.
Joint Research Centre. Global Land Cover 2000. Available at http://www-gvm.jrc.it/glc2000/ (Note: the USA, Central America and Australia portions of the GLC200 were updated by TNC using more recent and finer resolution data. The sources include the National Land-cover Dataset of the U.S. (Vogelmann 2001), regional datasets for Mesoamerica (Mas et al., 2002; World Bank 2001), National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) Australasia, 2000.)
World Wildlife Fund. (2001). Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World. Available from http://www.worldwildlife.org/science/ecoregions.cfm
Source URL: www.unep-wcmc.org
Methodology: The CRI value per country-biome is based on two 1 km global spatial datasets: the World Database on Protected Areas (2007), which reports the location and distribution of protected areas, and an updated version of the Global Land Cover 2000 data set, which provides the areas of natural habitat converted to human uses versus those not converted to human uses. The target for the Conservation risk index is the global average ratio of 1:2 (protected lands : converted lands). A ratio of protected to converted of less than 0.5 reflects poor performance in protecting a particular terrestrial biome. A score above 0.5 reflects a better than average performance in protecting a given biome. For example, the CRI for the Namibian Tropical Grasslands is 1.4 (i.e. 9.3% Protected and 6.6% Converted), which is a good performance rating.
The method for calculating CRI (Hoekstra et al. 2005) was implemented as the ratio between the percent of protected area per country-biome and the percent of converted land per country-biome. Data were generated at a 1 km level of resolution and percent values derived at the country-biome unit of analysis. The World Database on Protected Areas (2007), which gives us the protected vs. non-protected areas was processed as follows: (1) only National PAs were used (no international PAs); (2) PAs were removed that had the following Status: “proposed”, “voluntary” or “recommended”; (3) only PA points that did not have polygons and did not have a status according to #2 were buffered according to their defined area (using a Mollweide Projection); (4) the buffered points and polygons datasets were merged for the final WDPA dataset; and (5) an Arcinfo GRID with a 1km resolution was created from the final protected areas mask, with a value of 0 for unprotected and 1 for protected.
For the reclassified and updated GLC2000, an Arcinfo GRID was created with a value of 0 for unconverted lands, and a value of 1 for converted lands.
The zonal mean was calculated for each GRID for the WWF-biome-country dataset (the union of the country dataset and the WWF biome dataset). Calculating the zonal mean of each GRID by country-biome (pixel value 0 or 1) results in a value that can be used a percentage.
Note: For the country-biome units that were smaller than what can be reasonable calculated from the 1 km spatial data, areas were counted as ‘no data’. Given their size the resulting indicator should not be impacted.
Additional Citations: Hoekstra et al. 2005 National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) – Australasia, 2000. http://www.deh.gov.au/erin/nvis/index.html
Vogelmann, J.E., S.M. Howard, L. Yang, C.R. Larson, B.K. Wylie, N. Van Driel. (2001). Completion of the 1990s National Land Cover Data Set for the Conterminous United States from Landsat Thematic Mapper Data and Ancillary Data Sources, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 67, pp. 650-652.
Mas, J.-M., Velazquez, A., Palacio-Prieto, J.L., Bocco, G., Peralta, A., and Prado, J. (2002). Assessing forest resources in Mexico: wall-to-wall land use/cover mapping. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, Vol. 68, No. 10, pp. 966-1000.