Protected Areas (PAs), such as national parks and nature reserves serve as refuges for species and ecological processes that cannot survive in intensely managed or altered landscapes.  The 7th Conference of Parties (CoP7) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) drew up a the Programme of Work on Protected Areas (PoWPA) in 2004, which aims to improve the coverage, representativeness, and management of protected areas nationally, regionally and globally. The CBD proposed that governments carry out a gap analysis to find out if and where a country’s current PA system falls short of protecting all biodiversity. The CBD emphasizes that the aim is not simply to increase the number of PAs but that these, as far as possible, should be designed and located in the best places to conserve biodiversity and that they should be determined by a multi-stakeholder process. An early stage in identifying new PAs is carrying out a gap analysis of biodiversity and existing protected areas to identify what should be included in the protected area network.

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