Making a Difference (2016)

Biodiversity is in decline across the world, with unsustainable development destroying natural habitats and driving species extinct. This is reducing the capacity of our planet to sustain us into the future, and often causes the poorest in
society to lose out. BirdLife International is playing a unique and critical role in tackling this crisis.

BirdLife is the world’s largest nature conservation Partnership, comprising 120 national nature conservation organisations in 118 countries worldwide. Our unique structure
– a democratic partnership of grassroots organisations
– and the solid scientific foundation to our conservation programmes helps us to deliver high impact and long-term conservation that benefits both nature and people. Through a wealth of summary statistics and a selection of recent success stories, this report explores the many ways in which BirdLife is making a difference.

We profile some of the key achievements of the BirdLife Partnership in recent years, and the conservation targets we collectively aspire to achieve by the end of the decade. These address conserving environments from the open ocean to tropical rainforests, tackling threats ranging from invasive alien species to climate change, and employing conservation approaches from species recovery to protecting the most critical sites. The data quantifying these achievements derive from a recent systematic survey completed by all BirdLife Partners.

This review demonstrates that BirdLife is uniquely placed to deliver long-term sustainable solutions that are already providing substantial biodiversity benefits. With the support of donors, governments, businesses and civil society, we can scale up these successes and achieve substantial long-lasting benefits for nature and people.