Despite their iconic status, lion (Panthera leo) populations continue to decline across the majority of their range. In the light of the recent decision (in October 2017) to add lions to the Appendices of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), this paper identifies the new and existing legal protections afforded to lions through five global treaties, and maps these protections against the most critical contemporary threats facing the species. It thus offers a new analysis of the CMS listing, and draws on existing legal reviews, to highlight the ways in which global treaties offer differing forms of protection for lions. It then combines multiple concordant assessments of lion populations, to highlight nine categories of threat: human-lion conflict, bushmeat poaching, human encroachment, trophy hunting, trade in lion bones, unpredictable environmental events, socio-economic factors, policy failures, and governance/institutional weakness. The paper assesses how the various treaties each address these different categories of threat. The analysis identifies two pathways for improving legal protection: expanding the application of global treaties in respect of lions and their habitats (the paper considers the CMS listing in these terms), and improving the implementation of treaty commitments through local and national-scale actions. Furthermore, it identifies local implementation challenges that include the local knowledge of rules, compliance with rules and enforcement capacity, alongside the variety in local contexts and situations, and suggests where global treaties might provide support in meeting these challenges. We suggest that this analysis has wider implications for how treaty protection can and is utilised to protect various species of large-bodied, wide-ranging animals.

中文翻译：

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改善全球保护条约在应对当代对狮子的威胁中的作用。

尽管它们具有标志性的地位，但狮子（Panthera leo）的种群在其大部分范围内都继续下降。根据最近的决定（2017年10月），在《迁徙物种公约》（CMS）的附录中增加了狮子，本文确定了通过五项全球条约对狮子提供的新的和现有的法律保护，并将这些保护与该物种面临的最关键的当代威胁。因此，它提供了对CMS列表的新分析，并利用了现有的法律审查，突出了全球条约为狮子提供不同形式的保护的方式。然后，它结合了对狮子种群的多种一致的评估，以突出九种威胁类别：人与狮子的冲突，丛林肉偷猎，人类侵犯，奖杯狩猎，狮子骨贸易，不可预测的环境事件，社会经济因素，政策失灵以及治理/制度薄弱。本文评估了各种条约如何分别应对这些不同类别的威胁。该分析确定了改善法律保护的两种途径：扩大在狮子及其栖息地方面的全球条约的适用范围（本文以这些术语考虑了CMS的列表），以及通过地方和国家规模的行动来改善条约承诺的实施。此外，它确定了本地实施方面的挑战，包括本地的法规知识，法规的遵从性和执行能力，以及本地情况和情况下的多样性，并提出了全球条约可在哪些方面为应对这些挑战提供支持。