What is connectivity conservation?
CCSG defines connectivity conservation as the action of individuals, communities, institutions, and businesses to maintain, enhance, and restore ecological flows, species movement, and dynamic processes across intact and fragmented environments. Moreover, it is an innovative strategy that is bringing together a growing global movement to protect the vital interconnections of nature by providing a coordinated response for safeguarding biodiversity and increasing resilience to climate change.
CCSG promotes actions to protect ecological connectivity by more effectively designing, governing, and managing ecological corridors and networks of protected and conserved areas. We recognize that ecological corridors need greater conservation attention to protect the health and vitality of species, places, and processes. To prevent catastrophic loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services of social and economic importance, it is key to conserve ecological corridors and networks and manage them for compatible uses in ways that strengthen human wellbeing and support human-wildlife co-existence and restore connectivity where it has been lost. Thus, our ultimate aim is to maintain, enhance, and restore connected networks of protected and conserved areas around the world. Furthermore, transboundary cooperation is crucial for conservation, peace, and security, and to address the transboundary movements of people, processes, and animals.
As a direct countermeasure to fragmentation, connectivity conservation is multiplying investments in protected and conserved areas, helping stave off biodiversity loss and increasing nature’s resilience to climate change.
Read how the CCSG Chair, Deputy Chair and Secretariat staff explain the global significance of connectivity conservation:
Connectivity and …
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been promoting connectivity conservation for more than two decades. This includes over 20 related policy Resolutions adopted since 1996, such as WCC-2020-Res-073 “Ecological connectivity conservation in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework: from local to international levels“.
Learn more about how the CCSG is helping implement these resolutions.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has been a major driver of connectivity conservation in policy, most recently at the 15th Conference of the Parties (CoP-15), where governments of 196 countries adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework on 18 December 2022. This milestone agreement will now serve as the strategic plan for implementation of the Convention over the period 2022-2030. To date, this is the most significant agreement for bolstering global cooperation to conserve and restore nature. Ecological connectivity, and its measurement, is now elevated in importance and focus since being first addressed by Aichi Target 11, agreed to in 2010. Key goals and targets of the new framework have an enhanced acknowledgement of the fundamental contribution that ecological connectivity makes to functioning ecosystems and species.
The UN Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) adopted a formal definition of ecological connectivity, using input from the CCSG: “The unimpeded movement of species and the flow of natural processes that sustain life on Earth.” CMS maintains a suite of resources for conserving connectivity for migratory species and the landscapes which they depend on, and is a major partner for advancing connectivity conservation in policy and practice.