SNAPP: Documenting, measuring and valuing the ecosystem service and human well-­being benefits delivered by Key Biodiversity Areas

Important biodiversity areas are experiencing extreme pressures from the demand for natural resources. In an effort to support management decisions that account for biodiversity in policy, industry and local communities, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has led the development of a new standard for the identification of sites that contribute to the global persistence of biodiversity. The standard for identifying these sites, known as Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), is based solely on characteristics of the biodiversity they contain. The standard also requests that each identified site includes information on the ecosystem services provided as well as the human well-being benefits that are gained through its protection. A new SNAPP working group is bringing together the exiting efforts on ecosystem service assessment and the emerging KBA standards, with the goal of including ecosystem services and the benefits to human well-being in the KBA identification process. The SNAPP Working Group will evaluate currently available ecosystem service assessment tools, and determine in what instances those tools could be useful in providing ecosystem service and human well-being information to study sites in Cambodia and Canada. From this evaluation the group will develop standards for documenting ecosystem services generated by KBAs and implement these standards as part of KBA identification at the Cambodia and Canada sites.