With 14.7% of the Earth’s land and 12% of its territorial waters under protection, the world is on track to meet a major global conservation target according to UN Environment and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
But in their 2016 Protected Planet report, launched recently at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawai?i, UN Environment and IUCN also showed that crucial biodiversity areas are being left out, key species and habitats underrepresented and inadequate management is limiting the effectiveness of protected areas.
The huge gains in the number and size of protected areas made in the last decade have to be matched by improvements in their quality, as pointed out by UN Environment head Erik Solheim.
The world needs to do more to effectively protect our most biologically diverse spaces. Protected areas need to be better connected, to allow populations of animals and plants to mix and spread. Also important is ensuring local communities are involved in protection efforts. Their support is fundamental to long-term conservation.
Today, the world is facing critical environmental and societal challenges, such as climate change, food and water security, as underlined by IUCN Director General Inger Andersen. Protected areas play a major role in conserving species and ecosystems that help us confront these challenges. 
According to scientists at IUCN and UN Environment’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, there are 202,467 protected areas today, covering almost 20mn sq km or 14.7% of the world’s land, excluding Antarctica. That falls just short of the 17% target set for 2020 by the Convention on Biological Diversity under the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. 
Land coverage of protected areas has decreased by 0.7% since the last Protected Planet report. Scientists attribute the decline to fluxes in data, such as changes in boundaries, removal of some large sites from the World Database on Protected Areas and improved data quality, rather than an actual decrease in coverage on the ground.
Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean protect the largest portion of their land, amounting to nearly 5mn sq km. About half of that is in Brazil, which boasts the world’s largest protected land area system of 2.47mn sq km. 
The last decade has seen remarkable progress in protecting the world’s oceans. The size of marine protected areas has increased from just over 4mn in 2006 to nearly 17mn sq km today, covering four per cent of the Earth’s oceans, an area almost the size of Russia. 
But for all the growth in coverage, much remains to be done to improve the quality of protected areas. Currently less than 20% of the world’s key biodiversity areas are completely covered by protected areas.
Since the report data was collected additional marine areas came under protection, including US President Obama’s recent expansion of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawai’i, eight new protected sites in Malta and large marine parks in Chile and Palau. This brought the rate of protected territorial waters to 11.95% – up from 10.2% cited by the report.
The report recommends investing in protected areas to strengthen sustainable management of fisheries, control invasive species, cope with climate change and reduce harmful incentives, such as subsidies, which threaten biodiversity.