One of the basic purposes of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation interventions is to achieve conservation impact, the sum of avoided biodiversity loss and promoted recovery relative to outcomes without protection. In the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s negotiations on the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, we find that targets for area-based interventions are framed overwhelmingly with measures that fail to inform decision-makers about impact and that risk diverting limited resources away from achieving it. We show that predicting impact in space and time is feasible and can provide the basis for global guidance for jurisdictions to develop targets for conservation impact and shift investment priorities to areas where impact can be most effectively achieved.

保护区和其他基于区域的有效保护干预措施的基本目的之一是实现保护影响，即避免生物多样性丧失和促进恢复相对于没有保护的结果的总和。在《生物多样性公约》就 2020 年后全球生物多样性框架进行谈判的背景下，我们发现以区域为基础的干预措施的目标绝大多数是通过未能告知决策者影响的措施以及可能将有限的资源从实现它。我们表明，预测空间和时间的影响是可行的，可以为辖区制定保护影响目标和将投资重点转移到可以最有效地实现影响的领域提供全球指导的基础。