A new report on progress towards the 2020 targets of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), highlights its success in aligning actions by the world’s botanical and plant protection community through a shared set of principles and objectives. The report shows that while most of the 16 targets of the decades long plan to protect global plant diversity are unlikely to be met, countries have made considerable progress towards achieving many of them.

The Plant Conservation Report 2020 indicates that such progress is the result of actions under the strategy, with several new initiatives developed specifically to address GSPC targets. In the absence of the GSPC, these actions would likely not have taken place.

BGCI, and botanic gardens globally have played a key role in implementing the targets of the GSPC, and many of these actions are featured in the report which was launched on 15 September alongside the 5th Edition of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Biodiversity Outlook.

Among the successes highlighted in a press release by the CBD Secretariat are the establishment of a World Flora Online and the Global Tree Assessment. The World Flora Online, led by a Consortium of over 40 key institutions to create an open-access web-based compendium of the world’s 350,000 species of vascular plants and mosses (Target 1 – online flora of all known plants) provides a comprehensive baseline of knowledge on the world’s plants. The Global Tree Assessment (led by BGCI), aims to have completed Red List assessments for all the world’s tree species by 2020 (Target 2 – assessment of the conservation status of all known plant species), is of fundamental importance in helping prioritise national actions.