At the margins of the 2018 UN Biodiversity Conference, the governments of Egypt and China and the CBD Secretariat launched the Sharm El-Sheikh to Kunming Action Agenda for Nature and People1 to showcase concrete commitments and inspire strengthened action towards the final phase of implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and development of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

Following this, an international workshop was organized in The Hague from April 11 - 12, 2019 by PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the Netherlands Ministries of Agriculture, Nature and Food and of Infrastructure and Water Management, in collaboration with IDDRI, IUCN, IVM-VU, Earthmind, and UNEP-WCMC, to explore what the Action Agenda for Nature and People, prior to COP15 and as part of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, could look like and would entail in practice.

As a contribution to the Action Agenda, UNEP-WCMC and Earthmind, with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management reviewed existing online platforms that capture information on area-based commitments to conserve biodiversity and where possible identified commitments on ‘area-based conservation measures’. A discussion document (summarised in Annex 1 and appended at the end) was prepared as a contribution to the development of the post-2020 to help clarify the terms used in “area based conservation measures”, and was used in the CBD thematic workshop on area-based conservation measures for the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (1-3 December 2019).

This report outlines a review of commitment platforms using several criteria selected to get a better understanding of what an ideal Action Agenda portal for area-based conservation measures ought to contain, and whether there were existing systems available that could be modified for this purpose. The report concludes with a set of recommendations for a future Action Agenda platform for area-based conservation commitments.