Harnessing hidden synergies in conservation planning: do “umbrella action plans” reduce redundancy and improve efficiency?

Stefano Lucchesi, Erin Wessling 

Conservation Action Plans (APs) are widely used to guide biodiversity interventions, but they are often developed in isolation, leading to redundancy and poorly coordinated implementation. We assess whether identifying thematic overlap among APs can reveal practical opportunities for coordination, and introduce the concept of Umbrella Action Plans (UAPs) as a framework to streamline conservation planning. We distinguish two complementary forms of UAPs: coverage UAPs, defined as one or a small set of coordinated plans that together capture most conservation actions in a region, and alignment UAPs, which are plans that are highly aligned with others and can serve as practical hubs for joint implementation, monitoring, and resource sharing. Using a dataset of 85 APs from West Africa, we compared conservation actions across plans to evaluate overlap, grouping patterns, and the minimum number of plans needed to collectively cover the full action space. We found that most APs share substantial similarity in their actions, revealing widespread but underutilized coordination potential. A subset of 5–6 plans could together cover all conservation actions, with three consistently emerging as strong coordination hubs. These findings suggest that maximizing conservation impact may depend less on creating new APs and more on strategically aligning existing ones. Practitioners can use coverage UAPs as coordination anchors to ensure comprehensive representation of the conservation action space, and alignment UAPs as focal hubs for operational alignment and shared implementation. This framework provides a practical, transferable screening tool to guide more efficient and integrated conservation planning in resource-constrained contexts.