LocationsBeyond Conservation Targets: Integrating Biodiversity, Climate and Livelihoods in South Africa
March 24, 2026
South Africa has a long history of spatial planning that explicitly incorporates biodiversity considerations. As an early adopter of Systematic Conservation Planning1, the country has used this approach to develop biodiversity priority area maps, known as Critical Biodiversity Area (CBA) maps2, along with associated land- and sea-use guidelines, across its terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments. These products focus on spatial efficiency and complementarity in meeting quantitative biodiversity representation and persistence goals. They are well integrated into land-use planning and decision-making processes, including statutory environmental planning instruments. As a result, they provide a strong foundation for achieving national biodiversity objectives and have demonstrably reduced the risk of unplanned or poorly planned land-use change, as well as the loss of important biodiversity areas outside formally protected areas.
These planning products, however, are designed as biodiversity informants at the subnational scale and on their own are too narrowly focused to support coherent, integrated strategic planning at the national level.
The “Mapping Essential Life Support Action Areas” (ELSAA) process, piloted in South Africa in 2021–20223, addresses this gap by applying a deliberate national sustainable development, multi-objective, and multisectoral lens to prioritisation. ELSAA provides a mechanism to integrate biodiversity targets with broader considerations, including climate resilience, food and water security, the biodiversity economy, and human well-being.
Impact story
A powerful example illustrating the value of the ELSAA in South Africa is its application in responding to the global “30x30” conservation initiative and to Target 3 of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Upon adopting the KMGBF, South Africa embarked on a consultative process to develop a coherent, ambitious response to Target 3 as an apex target and key mechanism by which to pursue conservation of the full diversity of nature in a way that provides services and underpins livelihoods. South Africa’s existing CBA Maps and National Protected Area Expansion Strategy (NPAES) fell short of this explicit alignment to the 30 × 30 ambition and requirement of 30 x 30 implementation to maximise building socio-ecological resilience through a range of actions from protection to more sustainable production practices to restoration and adaptation. The ELSAA outputs were, however, found to provide a timely, data-driven snapshot of what a broad-based approach to reach Target 3 could look like, while catering for multiple other GBF and policy objectives, filling an important gap in South Africa’s planning toolbox.
The ELSAA pilot project, having proved a powerful aid in visualizing the spatial patterns and trade-offs required to integrate ecological, economic, and social objectives in one spatial plan, has informed the development of a second iteration of the ELSAA map (ELSAA 2.0), which incorporates updated national datasets and new UN Biodiversity Lab (UNBL) tools. As the revised National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (2025-2035) is developed and protected areas agencies, such as South African National Parks, develop ambitious “people-centred” conservation frameworks (e.g., Vision 2040, which aims to reimagine the role and contribution of National Parks in the landscape setting), these newly updated ELSAA maps and webtool can continue to fulfil the role of providing a coherent picture for multi-objective and multisector spatial planning aligned with South Africa’s policy commitments. Furthermore, the ability to adjust various targets and weights in the ELSAA tool allows for real-time exploration of different scenarios and the participation of policymakers and non-planners period.
In addition to the 30 x 30 discourse, the ELSAA Map has been used in a range of other processes, ranging from project development to national restoration planning.
Ultimately, the ELSAA process reinforces the importance of integrated spatial planning in enabling effective, evidence-based, and data-driven decision-making as articulated by the UN Biodiversity Lab: “Providing decision-makers with the best available spatial data is essential to placing nature at the centre of sustainable development, thereby highlighting the critical role of spatial data in informed planning and policy processes”.
Testimonies
"Given that the current [National Protected Area Expansion Strategy] NPAES (2018) is insufficient to convey the required scale, ambition, and representivity of the terrestrial component of Target 3, another product is required... Fortunately, the DFFE (in collaboration with SANBI and UNDP) embarked on an exercise to explore Essential Life Support Action Areas (ELSAAs). The outputs from this process provide a snapshot of what a broad-based approach to reach Target 3 could look like and cater to multiple other GBF and White Paper objectives simultaneously. The best indication of where future representative protection would best be located is shown in the output overleaf (model run with a protection Target of 30%)." DFFE: 30x30 Implementation Workshop (2023)
“Countries in the SADC region have expressed the need to address data gaps and fragmentation, build technical capacity, and create national and regional dashboards to monitor and report on their NBSAPs and the GBF. SANBI sees great potential to collaborate with the UNBL partnership to build scalable solutions to support the Seventh and Eighth National Reports. ”Ntakadzeni Tshidada (SANBI)
“As we are reimagining conservation in South Africa, especially the work around expansion of our conservation estate, it's important that we don't leave anyone behind. It was very fortunate for us to be involved in the ELSA project, because the ELSA map enabled us to support joint planning and decision-making by all entities that are invested in our natural resources.” Mukondi Matshusa (DFFE)
[1] Margules, C.R. and Pressey, R.L., 2000. Systematic conservation planning. Nature, 405(6783), pp.243-253.
[2] SANBI. 2024. What is a CBA Map? SANBI Factsheet series. South African National Biodiversity Institute, Pretoria (https://opus.sanbi.org/sanbiserver/api/core/bitstreams/465b545c-faa5-4534-8eba-fc6e36752c25/content)
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