BirdLife released a new report, Birds and Biodiversity Targets, which builds on the recent coverage of the world’s catastrophic failure to meet global targets to save biodiversity. While there is plenty of doom and gloom around this subject, there have also been numerous successes over the past decade that demonstrate how achievable – and affordable – nature conservation can be with sufficient political investment.

Key successes over the past decade include:

• Some of the most critical sites for conservation of birds – Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas –have been formally recognised as protected areas, with their average coverage increasing from 38% to 44% since 2010.
   
• Conservation has prevented up to 48 extinctions and slowed the rate at which species are moving towards extinction by 40% over recent decades.
   
• Measures to prevent accidental ‘bycatch’ of seabirds in fisheries have virtually eliminated albatross deaths in the South African hake trawl fishery.
   
• Community efforts to tackle the hunting of birds have been spectacularly successful in some locations, for example ending the capture of >100,000 Amur Falcons each year in Nagaland, India.