Can a plan save a species? Introducing the Conservation Plan Scorecard

Australia has more than 2,000 national conservation plans for its threatened species, ecological communities and threatening processes. When the Auditor-General last counted, in 2022, there were 410 recovery plans, 12 threat abatement plans and 1,595 conservation advices (ANAO 2022). They shape where governments spend money, which land is protected, how forests are managed and burned, and what landholders can and cannot do. Their stakes are high, for the species they are written for and for the communities that live alongside them.

Yet there is no common, public test of whether a plan is actually capable of doing its job. A plan can be long, carefully referenced and well intentioned, and still be unable to tell anyone what to do first, where, at what cost, or how success will be measured.

Today the Healthy Forests Foundation is releasing the Conservation Plan Scorecard: a free, transparent standard for assessing whether a conservation plan can guide decisions. We will use it to review plans as they are released for public comment, and we invite anyone (governments, scientists, land managers, Traditional Owners and community groups) to use it too.

Plans that describe, but do not direct

The most common weakness we’ve seen is plans that describes a species and its threats thoroughly, then stops short of the decisions that matter. Typical gaps include:

objectives such as “stable or increasing”, with no target that would show whether the species is safe

habitat definitions so broad that almost everything qualifies, so nothing is prioritised

threats all rated at the highest level, so the ratings cannot tell anyone which to tackle first

long lists of actions, most rated urgent, few costed, none ranked by what they would achieve for the money, and none assigned to anyone

performance measures with no baseline to measure against.

These gaps have real consequences. Conservation funding is finite. When a plan treats everything as a priority or never weighs what an action costs against what it achieves, effort is spread thinly across areas and actions of lower value, and the places that matter most may go unmanaged. A designation on paper can be mistaken for protection on the ground. And when nobody is responsible for an action, it is easy for nobody to do it.

These are not isolated problems. The Auditor-General’s 2022 audit found that the average recovery plan was more than 12 years old, and that the responsible department did not track whether most plans were being implemented. Of the 11 recovery plans whose progress had been reviewed against their actions, only 23% of actions had been completed; most had been started but not finished. The audit also found no measurement or reporting of how conservation plans contribute to their intended outcomes (ANAO 2022). A consistent, public test of plan quality is one practical way to start closing that gap.

Four questions every plan should answer

The scorecard starts from a simple idea. A conservation plan is a decision tool, so it should answer 4 questions:

What is to be conserved, and to what level?

Where does effort matter most?

Which actions come first, and at what cost?

How will success be judged, and who is responsible?

To test this, we drew on systematic conservation planning, the established discipline for deciding where and how to direct conservation effort. Its core concepts were reviewed by Kukkala and Moilanen (2013). Several have Australian roots. Comprehensiveness, adequacy and representativeness were established for Australia’s own forest reserve system, through the National Forest Policy Statement (1992) and the JANIS criteria (1997). In other words, the scorecard asks no more of a conservation plan than Australian policy has long asked of forest reserves.

Ten of the scorecard’s fifteen standards come from that body of work. Two of the review’s twelve concepts (representativeness and replacement cost) are left out because they apply to networks of reserves rather than to plans for a single species or community. Five further standards cover evidence and implementation, which the review largely leaves aside. Three of these reflect elements the review identifies in the planning process. Two, evidence quality and accountability, are the Foundation’s own additions.

Standard	The question it asks
Comprehensiveness	Does the plan define everything that needs to be conserved?
Adequacy	Are there targets high enough to secure the species’ long-term survival?
Representation and persistence	Does it distinguish where the species has been recorded from where it is likely to persist?
Threat	Are threats rated on evidence, in a way that distinguishes the most serious from the rest?
Vulnerability	Does it show which areas are most likely to be lost?
Irreplaceability	Does it identify the places that cannot be substituted?
Complementarity	Does it consider how its actions affect each other and other species?
Efficiency	Are actions costed, and prioritised by what each achieves for its cost?
Flexibility	Does it allow different ways of meeting its targets?
Effectiveness	Can success be measured against a baseline, monitored and used to adapt management?
Clear, operable definitions	Are key terms precise enough to apply consistently?
Engagement	Were stakeholders, including First Nations, involved in developing and delivering it?
Social and economic considerations	Are impacts on communities and land uses assessed, not just listed?
Evidence quality	Can its key claims and ratings be traced to published sources that support them?
Accountability	Does each action have a lead party, timeframe and funding?

How a plan is graded

Each standard is rated against the plan as published:

Met (2 points): the plan satisfies the standard in a form that can guide a decision.

Partly met (1 point): the plan addresses the standard, but not in a form that can be applied or assessed.

Not met (0 points): the plan does not address the standard.

The total, out of 30, sets a grade from A+ (exemplary) to E (not fit for purpose as a decision document). Scores of D or E are a Fail.

Grade
Score	90% or more	80 to 89%	70 to 79%	60 to 69%	50 to 59%	35 to 49%	Below 35%
Meaning	Exemplary. A model for other plans.	Strong. A clear guide to decisions, with minor gaps.	Sound. Guides decisions, though some standards are only partly met.	Adequate. Usable, but with significant gaps.	Weak. Describes the species and threats but gives limited guidance.	Poor. Cannot reliably guide decisions.	Not fit for purpose as a decision document.

Five standards are decision-critical, because they answer the 4 questions directly: adequacy, irreplaceability, efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. A plan cannot earn a good grade on description alone while failing these. If one is not met, the grade can be no higher than B; two, no higher than C; three or more, no higher than D.

How we tested it

Before release, we applied the scorecard to the 11 most recent national recovery plans made under the EPBC Act, and to one plan still in development. Together they cover birds, land mammals, a whale, a fish, an insect and a tree, across every state and territory and Australian waters.

The 11 made plans graded from B+ to C. No plan reached an A, and one gap was common to every plan: none set its priorities by what each action would achieve for its cost.

Click here to see an overview of how the plans did using our scorecard.

Three patterns stood out. Quantified targets were rare: most plans set a direction of change rather than a level that would show the species is secure. Whether actions were costed and assigned depended more on the format a plan followed than on the species it covered. And no plan we tested set its priorities by what each action would achieve for the money; where priorities were given, they reflected urgency. All 3 are fixable, and some of the plans we tested already show how to fix the first 2.

Why we are doing this

The Foundation exists to care for Australia’s forests and the life they support, now and for future generations. Good plans are central to that. They are how the community decides what stewardship of our forests should look like, and how public money is directed to it.

The scorecard is not about finding fault. It is about making plans that work: plans that tell land managers, Traditional Owners, scientists and funders where to focus, and that can be held to account for results. A low grade is a call for a better plan, not an argument against acting.

A scorecard is only useful if people trust it. We are making 3 commitments:

Open method. The full method, sources and rating rules are published, including which standards are the Foundation’s own additions and the changes we made after testing.

Even-handed application. We will score plans across species, ecosystems, jurisdictions and authors, and we will publish good grades as readily as poor ones.

Right of reply and correction. Plan authors can respond to any assessment, and we will correct errors promptly and publicly.

Get involved

Use it. Download the scorecard and method [LINK] and apply it to a plan you know. We would like to hear how it works in practice.

Suggest a plan. Tell us which recovery plans, conservation advices or management plans you would like to see assessed.

Challenge us. If you think a standard, a rating rule or one of our assessments is wrong, tell us why. The scorecard will be better for it.

Sources

Kukkala AS and Moilanen A (2013) ‘Core concepts of spatial prioritisation in systematic conservation planning’, Biological Reviews, 88:443–464, doi:10.1111/brv.12008.
Australian National Audit Office (2022) Management of Threatened Species and Ecological Communities under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, Auditor-General Report, Canberra.

The descriptions of the standards drawn from Kukkala and Moilanen are the Foundation’s paraphrases; the scorecard, its additional standards, its rating rules and its grading system are the Foundation’s own.