# **1. Introduction**

The world is rapidly losing biodiversity. Pimm et al. (2014)<sup>1</sup> found that the current rate of species extinction is at least 1,000 times the background rate. Supporting evidence from the Living Planet Index (LPI), which tracks population trends for vertebrate species in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats, shows a 69% decline since 1970.

The LPI informs the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Conference of Parties (COP). In response to indicators of rapid decline, 188 governments ratified the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) at COP 15 in December 2022. Among other measures, the Framework commits participants to protecting 30% of the planet by 2030. This has been labeled the Global 30x30 Initiative and commonly abbreviated as “30x30”.

Effective implementation of 30x30 requires addressing two key questions: (1) What is the spatial distribution of global biodiversity that should be protected? (2) How can protecting 30% of the planet best conserve this biodiversity?

In a previous paper (Dasgupta et al. 2024), we addressed the first question using the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which has expanded to include occurrences for over 2 million species. In the past two years, the GBIF has added about 1.3 million occurrence records daily. Most records include locational coordinates, enabling new estimates of spatial distributions for previously unmapped species and improved estimates for species with existing maps. Using machine-based pattern recognition, we estimated spatial occurrence maps for over 600,000 species. These maps complement previous work by greatly expanding representation for plants, invertebrates and other non-vertebrate species. Our algorithm allows rapid updates and new maps as the GBIF data increase.

In this paper, we draw on the previous work to explore some implications for 30x30 in a sample of 10 countries in Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. We focus on individual countries to highlight the role of conservation stewardship in local settings. Our country analyses begin with current protected areas, which exhibit great cross-country variation in territorial coverage and representation of species taxa. We consider both terrestrial and marine cases, focusing on species that are endemic to each country. Drawing on our GBIF spatial database for nearly 600,000 species, we overlay species occurrence maps on the most recent protected-area maps from the World Database of Protected Areas. This enables identification of endemic species whose coverage by existing protected areas is either non-existent or extremely sparse.

Our approach departs from many previous exercises by giving equal weight to all vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and other species whose occurrence regions are mapped in our database. We use a spatially-efficient algorithm to identify a hierarchy of priorities for localities where new

> 1 Pimm, S. L., Jenkins, C. N., Abell, R., Brooks, T. M., Gittleman, J. L., Joppa, L. N., ... & Sexton, J. O. 2014. The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection. Science, 344(6187), 1246752.

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