The Important Bird Areas (IBA) Programme of BirdLife International is a worldwide project launched in 1989 aimed at identifying, monitoring and protecting a network of critical sites for the world’s birds. The IBA Programme is global in scale, and it is anticipated that up to 15,000 IBAs will be identifi ed worldwide through this project. IBAs are sites of global importance for biodiversity identified at a national level, using internationally agreed, objective, quantitative and scientifically defensible criteria. IBAs are selected because they hold bird species that are threatened with extinction, have highly restricted distributions, or are characteristic of particular biomes. Sites holding exceptionally large numbers of congregatory birds also qualify. The IBA network can be considered as a minimum set of sites critical for the long-term viability of wild bird populations, across the range of those bird species for which a sites-based approach is appropriate.