The Maputaland Conservation Planning System and Conservation Assessment

The first MCA was undertaken in 2006 and identifies a potential conservation landscape for Maputaland. Such a landscape would maintain the biodiversity of the region and would consist of the existing PAs, together with new core areas and conservation linkages. The MCA does not specify how these new core areas and linkages should be owned or managed. Instead, it identifies which areas are needed to meet the representation target for all of the desired conservation features.

Individual targets were set for each conservation feature based on their underlying ecology and conservation status. Previous research from South Africa was used to identify appropriate targets for the landcover types, which helped ensure that these conservation features acted as effective biodiversity surrogates. Most of the species targets were set to ensure that Maputaland contained viable populations of each species, although targets for wide-ranging species were based on conserving a viable metapopulation within Southern Africa. The initial data from the MCA showed that the present PA system protects an area of 3,601km2, so that 21% of Maputaland currently has PA status. These PAs ensure that the representation targets are met for 53 of the 110 conservation features, and that 27% of the landcover type targets and 65% of the species targets are met. The median percentage target met for the remaining features was 44% and this ranged from 0% for 6 features and 99.8% for the Lubombo aquatic South landcover type.

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• The Maputaland Conservation Planning System and Conservation Assessment