Key Biodiversity Areas: review and lessons learned workshop Aims and scope Churchill Hotel, Washington DC 25 July 2006

Overall goal of the workshop  To review progress and share lessons learned throughout the CI CBCs and regional programs from the last five years of experience in the identification of Key Biodiversity Areas

Specific objectives of the workshop  Delineation  KBAs in high-biodiversity wilderness areas  Partner engagement  Survey priorities  Cost of the KBA process  Prioritizing conservation actions among KBAs  Input for the updating CI’s Strategy Handbook

Delineation  Review the challenges facing KBA delineation  Categorize these challenges in a coherent way that lends itself to solving them  Recommend a process to write up a paper on these challenges and solutions to be incorporated into CI’s Strategy Handbook

KBAs in high-biodiversity wilderness areas  Review KBA identification in high-biodiversity wilderness areas to date  Assess the challenges to KBA identification in these areas, and make recommendations for solving them  Outline a process by which the relevant CBCs can move forward with KBA identification in these regions

Partner engagement  Review partner engagement in KBA processes  Recommend products or processes that would enhance partner engagement to different sectors  Outline the process that should be undertaken to develop such products

Survey priorities  Synthesize the research for identifying candidate KBAs as survey priorities, underway through the CBCs and regional programs  Recommend which methods appear most promising  Suggest mechanisms that might be useful in supporting such research

Cost of the KBA process  Review, categorize and generalize the costs of KBA processes, to develop a standard KBA process budget  Consider what factors influence variation in these costs  Consider the benefits of KBAs, and the costs of not identifying them

Prioritizing conservation actions among KBAs  Review prioritization methods proposed in the guidelines manual, and other methods tested to date  Develop a more comprehensive process for testing methods for the prioritization of conservation action among KBAs

(Important) Issues that are beyond the scope of this workshop 1) Definition of corridor level outcomes 2) Implementation of site conservation on the ground 3) Regions where CI has not conducted KBA work 4) The marine environment

Definition of corridor level outcomes  The definition of targets for biodiversity conservation outcomes at the sea / landscape level remains an important research front  A process is underway for addressing this, building from the corridors workshop in Santarém, Brazil, Dec 2004

Implementation of site conservation on the ground  Again, developing guidelines and support for site conservation implementation (“so, now that I know that this site is a high priority KBA, what do I do now?”) is an extremely important issue  Again, a process is underway for addressing this, building from the site planning workshop in La Selva, Costa Rica, Sep 2005

Regions where CI has not conducted KBA work  Only three CI regional programs have yet to engage with KBA work, in all cases due to funding constraints  Many regions beyond the hotspots and high- biodiversity wilderness areas have conducted KBA work, but this workshop is intentionally an internal one

The marine environment  KBAs are only just starting to be identified in the marine environment  A CI process is underway for addressing this, building from the marine KBA workshop in Washington DC, USA, in Aug 2005