How Combining Climate and Disaggregated National Indicators Can Enhance Mountain Biodiversity Conservation Efforts

Reporting for Sustainable Development Goal 15.4.1—which measures the coverage of important sites for mountain biodiversity by protect areas—is calculated at the national scale using data from the World Database of Protected Areas and mountainous Key Biodiversity Areas. However, given the occurrence of multiple mountain ranges within and across countries, and high variability in their protection calls for a disaggregation of SDG 15.4.1 to support locally relevant decision making and management. With the availability of a new highly resolved inventory of the world's mountains from the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment, such a spatial disaggregation of SDG 15.4.1 to individual mountain ranges can be effectively done. By capitalizing on the hierarchical structure of this new inventory and the attribution of individual mountains to parent ranges and systems, reporting can be performed across spatial scales. To illustrate the potential of higher resolution reporting, we present the latest values of SDG 15.4.1 for the mountain ranges and systems of the GMBA inventory V2.0. We further compare time series across countries and mountain ranges, discuss differences in how to aggregate the data and the interpretation of the resulting outcomes, and introduce an interactive tool to browse SDG 15.4.1 online. In order to enable additional informed biodiversity protection decision making at sub-national scale, we couple this data with historic and future climate projections from CMIP6 to create additional tools for risk assessment of local mountain biodiversity that may be used in conjunction with local governance processes.