Protected area

Milford Sound, New Zealand: Mitre Peak, the mountain at left, rises 1,692 m (5,550 ft) above the Sound.

An elephant safari through the Jaldapara Wildlife Sanctuary in West Bengal, India

Arribes del Duero Natural Park (Salamanca and Zamora, Spain).

National Park, Swiss Alps

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The term protected area describes a wide array of land and water designations, of which some of the best known are national park, nature reserve, wilderness area, wildlife management area and landscape protected area but can also include such approaches as community conserved areas. More importantly, the term embraces a wide range of different management approaches, from highly protected sites where few if any people are allowed to enter, through parks where the emphasis is on conservation but visitors are welcome, to much less restrictive approaches where conservation is integrated into the traditional human lifestyles or even takes place alongside limited sustainable resource extraction ^[1]. The term protected area includes Marine Protected Areas, which refers to protected areas whose boundaries include some area of ocean.

Protected areas are essential for biodiversity conservation. They are the cornerstones of virtually all national and international conservation strategies. They are areas set aside to maintain functioning natural ecosystems, to act as refuges for species and to maintain ecological processes that cannot survive in most intensely managed landscapes and seascapes. Protected areas act as benchmarks against which we understand human interactions with the natural world. Today they are often the only hope we have of stopping many threatened or endemic species from becoming extinct. Protected areas also have direct human benefits. People – both those living in or near protected areas and others from further away – gain from the opportunities for recreation and renewal available in national parks and wilderness areas, from the genetic potential of wild species and the environmental services provided by natural ecosystems, such as provision of water. Many protected areas are also essential for vulnerable human societies and conserve places of value such as sacred natural sites. Although many protected areas are set up by governments, others are increasingly established by local communities, indigenous peoples, environmental charities, private individuals, companies and others ^[2].

There are currently over 120,000 protected areas covering 12.2 per cent of the Earth’s land area, 5.9 per cent of the territorial seas and only 0.5 per cent of the extraterritorial seas (territorial seas extend from the shore to 12 nautical miles offshore; extraterritorial seas are those marine areas beyond the territorial seas; they extend from 12 nautical miles offshore and include the exclusive economic zones and high seas)^[3]. Details of this global network of protected areas can be found on the World Database on Protected Areas[10] managed by UNEP-WCMC. The vast majority of protected areas were identified and gazetted during the twentieth century, in what is almost certainly the largest and fastest conscious change of land management in history (although not as large as the mainly unplanned land degradation that has taken place over the same period) ^[4].

The success of protected areas as a tool for conservation is based around the assumption that they are managed to protect the values that they contain. Unfortunately, the commitment to setting aside land and water has yet to be always matched with similar commitments of resources for management. In other cases, even though management systems are in place, the pressures on protected areas are so great that their values continue to degrade. The recognition of the critical role that management needs to play to secure biodiversity within protected area networks has created much interest in the assessment of management effectiveness using more rigorous approaches. Information on the framework for management effectiveness assessments, methodologies and the results of thousands of assessment worldwide can be found on the World Database on Protected Areas[11] ^[5].

IUCN Definition

In an attempt to make sense of and to describe the different types of protected area, IUCN has agreed a definition of what a protected area is and is not, and then identified six different protected area categories, based on management objectives (note this is not the only definition of a protected area)^[6].

A protected area, when using the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) definition, is: A clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values^[7]. This definition is explained in some detail, as are a series of accompanying principles, in the Guidelines for Applying Protected Area Management Categories prepared by the World Commission on Protected Areas. The Guidelines also detail the six IUCN Protected Area categories and four broad governance types under which protected areas usually fall ^[8].

Although the definition and categories were originally intended mainly for the reasonably modest aim of helping to collate data and information on protected areas, they have grown over time into a more complex tool. Today the categories both encapsulate IUCN’s philosophy of protected areas and also help to provide a framework in which various protection strategies can be combined together, along with supportive management systems outside protected areas, into a coherent approach to conserving nature. The IUCN categories are now used for purposes as diverse as planning, setting regulations and negotiating land and water uses.

This variety of approaches reflects recognition that conservation is not achieved by the same route in every situation and what may be desirable or feasible in one place could be counter-productive or politically impossible in another.

History

Protected areas are cultural artifacts and their story is entwined with that of human civilization. Over 2000 years ago, royal decrees in India protected certain areas. In Europe, rich and powerful people protected hunting grounds for a thousand years. Moreover, the idea of protection of special places is universal: for example, it occurs among the communities in the Pacific (“tapu” areas) and in parts of Africa (sacred groves). However, the modern protected areas movement had nineteenth century origins in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Other countries were quick to follow suit. While the idea of protected areas spread around the world in the twentieth century, the driving force was different in different regions. Thus, in North America, protected areas were about safeguarding dramatic and sublime scenery; in Africa, the concern was with game parks; in Europe, landscape protection was more common^[9].

International commitments to the development of networks of protected areas date from 1972, when the Stockholm Declaration from the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment endorsed the protection of representative examples of all major ecosystem types as a fundamental requirement of national conservation programs. Since then, the protection of representative ecosystems has become a core principle of conservation biology, supported by key United Nations resolutions - including the World Charter for Nature 1982, the Rio Declaration at the Earth Summit (1992), and the Johannesburg Declaration 2002.

Global standards for protected area establishment and effective management were further highlighted in 2004 when the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) [12]agreed an ambitious Programme of Work on Protected Areas[13], which aims to complete ecologically-representative protected area systems around the world and has almost a hundred time-limited targets. This is necessary because although the rate of growth has been impressive, many protected areas have been set up in remote, unpopulated or only sparsely populated areas such as mountains, ice-fields and tundra and there are still notable gaps in protected area systems in some forest and grassland ecosystems, in deserts and semi-deserts, in freshwaters and, particularly, in coastal and marine areas.

Globally, national programs for the protection of representative ecosystems have progressed with respect to terrestrial environments, with less progress in marine and freshwater biomes.

Criticism

Protected areas are the result of a welcome emphasis on long-term thinking and care for the natural world but also sometimes come with a price tag for those living in or near the areas being protected, in terms of lost rights, land or access to resources. As such, they have been criticized for the displacement of local population.^[10]

There is increasing and justifiable pressure to take proper account of human needs when setting up protected areas and these sometimes have to be “traded off” against conservation needs. Whereas in the past governments often made decisions about protected areas and informed local people afterwards, today the emphasis is shifting towards greater discussions with stakeholders and joint decisions about how such lands should be set aside and managed. Such negotiations are never easy but usually produce stronger and longer-lasting results for both conservation and people ^[11].

See also

• Applied ecology
• Community Conservation Areas
• Indigenous Protected Areas
• World Commission on Protected Areas
• Zakaznik

References

External links

• IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas
• World Database on Protected Areas
• Protect Planet Ocean: The only place on the web dedicated to bringing all aspects of Marine Protected Areas to your desktop

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