Each goal, of the Strategic Plan addresses a different challenge related to halting biodiversity loss. Strategic Goal A addresses required socio-economic and institutional changes. Strategic Goal B focuses on reducing the direct pressures on biodiversity and ecosystems while Strategic Goal C covers active efforts to improve biodiversity status. Strategic Goal D aims to ensure the

flow of benefits from biodiversity and ecosystems to people, especially to the communities whose subsistence is strongly tied to local ecosystem services. Finally, Strategic Goal E aims at developing the conditions required for implementation of the Strategic Plan as well as developing the knowledge base. Actions to achieve one target may influence other targets; in turn a target may be influenced by actions taken towards http://www.selleckchem.com/products/VX-770.html the attainment of other targets. The

first type of interactions are downstream interactions, while the latter are upstream interactions. Taking actions to achieve targets with a high number of downstream interactions will help achieving progress towards other targets. These can be seen as enabling actions as they can facilitate the achievement of the whole Strategic Plan. A target with a high level of upstream interactions is a target that will benefit from actions taken to achieve several other targets. To determine the potential interactions

among the selleckchem twenty Aichi Targets, a group of 18 experts (composed of GBO-4 Technical Report authors and reviewers) qualitatively assessed how the achievement of any given Aichi Target could influence the achievement of the other targets. The following ordinal scores were used by each expert to qualify all the target interactions, either negative STK38 or positive, in a matrix: (1) low influence, (2) intermediate influence, and (3) high influence. For each entry of the matrix the mode of all the scores was used as the final level of influence (Fig. 1). The relative agreement between all experts was determined by computing, for each entry, the percentage of experts that attributed the mode value to that specific entry. Finally, for each target we calculated the sum of downstream interactions (sum of scores 1, 2 and 3 row-wise), the sum of upstream interactions (sum of scores 1, 2 and 3 column-wise), and the difference between these values (Fig. 2). The analysis was done using R and the packages abind and igraph (Csardi and Nepusz, 2006, Plate and Heiberger, 2011 and R Core Team, 2014). We identified targets under Strategic Goals A and E as having the highest level of net downstream interactions (Fig. 2). Generally, their influence spans all targets (Fig. 1).