Social acceptability of a marine protected area: The case of Reunion Island

This paper examines variations in social acceptability of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) prior to implementation. The influence of a number of factors, including socio-economic characteristics, perception of coral resources state of health and attitudes towards non-compliance with regulations are analysed. During May 2006, 640 questionnaires were distributed to school children around Reunion Island, Western Indian Ocean, for completion by their parents, following an informal educational activity made in school. From a 73% (n = 469) response rate, results showed that 78% of participants were in favour of the MPA. Analysis further identified that those supportive of the MPA were generally from higher socio-professional categories, had a negative perception of the coral reef ecosystem's health and were not originally from Reunion. In contrast, locals (born in Reunion) from lower socio-professional categories or with no employment activity and having a positive perception of the health status of coral reefs offered no opinion on the MPA. Attitudes towards enforcement and compliance highlighted that SCUBA divers, fishers and jet skiers attributed a higher value to the protection of the coral reef environment through enforcement of MPA regulations than to their own use of the coral reef resource. When asked about the use of penalties to deter non-compliance, swimmers were awarded the lowest fines, followed by SCUBA divers, fishers then jet skiers being awarded the highest fines. Thus, the more severe the act of non-compliance by a resource user group was perceived to be, the more these users themselves disapproved of non-compliant behaviour and supported use of high penalties. The survey design through focusing on school children's parents, demonstrated a simple and cost-effective method for data collection while providing environmental education, which could be employed in similar case studies elsewhere

Social Value of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas in England and Wales.

The U.K. government is committed to establishing a coherent network of marine protected areas by 2012 and the recentMarine and Coastal Access Act, 2009 will designate marine conservation zones and provide wider access rights to the coast. To fulfill these goals, this article argues the need for a clearer, shared understanding of the social value of protected areas in creating new designations and managing existing ones. Although marine and coastal environments attract many people and are vitally important in terms of realized and potential social value, the majority of the public in the United Kingdom lacks understanding and awareness regarding them. Combined with this, the social value of marine and coastal protected areas (MCPAs) have been largely ignored relative to conservation and economics, with the latter invariably taking precedence in environmental policymaking. Social value reflects the complex, individual responses that people experience in a given place. Many reasons determine why one area is valued above another, and this research investigates the social value of MCPAs from a practitioner’s perspective through a series of interviews. Understanding why we “socially” value MCPAs will ultimately equip managers with an informed understanding of these spaces, influence management decisions, and, potentially, policymaking. This article defines social value in the context of MCPAs in England and Wales from a practitioner perspective, explores key concepts, and suggests possible improvements in decision-making

How well do the existing and proposed reserve networks represent vertebrate species in Chile?

Increasingly, biogeographical knowledge and analysis are playing a fundamental role in assessing the representativeness of biodiversity in protected areas, and in identifying critical areas for conservation. With almost 20% of the country assigned to protected areas, Chile is well above the conservation target (i.e. 10-12%) proposed by many international conservation organizations. Moreover, the Chilean government has recently proposed new conservation priority sites to improve the current protected area network. Here, we used all 653 terrestrial vertebrate species present in continental Chile to assess the performance of the existing and proposed reserve networks. Using geographical information systems, we overlaid maps of species distribution, current protected areas, and proposed conservation priority sites to assess how well each species is represented within these networks. Additionally, we performed a systematic reserve selection procedure to identify alternative conservation areas for expanding the current reserve system. Our results show that over 13% of the species are not covered by any existing protected area, and that 73% of Chilean vertebrate species can be considered partial gaps, with only a small fraction of their geographical ranges currently under protection. The coverage is also deficient for endemic (species confined to Chile) and threatened species. While the proposed priority sites do increase coverage, we found that there are still several gaps and these are not the most efficient choices. Both the gap analysis and the reserve selection analysis identified important areas to be added to the existing reserve system, mostly in northern and central Chile. This study underscores the need for a systematic conservation planning approach to redefine the conservation priority sites in order to maximize the representation of species, particularly endemic and threatened species.Fil: Tognelli, Marcelo Fabio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas. Provincia de Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas; Argentina. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; ChileFil: De Arellano, Pablo I. Ramirez. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Chile. State University of New York; Estados UnidosFil: Marquet, Pablo A.. Instituto de Ecologia y Biodiversidad, Santiago; Chile. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Chile. National Center For Ecological Analysis And Synthesis; Estados Unido

Human population and socioeconomic modulators of conservation performance in 788 Amazonian and Atlantic Forest reserves

Protected areas form a quintessential component of the global strategy to perpetuate tropical biodiversity within relatively undisturbed wildlands, but they are becoming increasingly isolated by rapid agricultural encroachment. Here we consider a network of 788 forest protected areas (PAs) in the world’s largest tropical country to examine the degree to which they remain intact, and their responses to multiple biophysical and socioeconomic variables potentially affecting natural habitat loss under varying contexts of rural development. PAs within the complex Brazilian National System of Conservation Units (SNUC) are broken down into two main classes—strictly protected and sustainable use. Collectively, these account for 22.6% of the forest biomes within Brazil’s national territory, primarily within the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest, but are widely variable in size, ecoregional representation, management strategy, and the degree to which they are threatened by human activities both within and outside reserve boundaries. In particular, we examine the variation in habitat conversion rates in both strictly protected and sustainable use reserves as a function of the internal and external human population density, and levels of land-use revenue in adjacent human-dominated landscapes. Our results show that PAs surrounded by heavily settled agro-pastoral landscapes face much greater challenges in retaining their natural vegetation, and that strictly protected areas are considerably less degraded than sustainable use reserves, which can rival levels of habitat degradation within adjacent 10-km buffer areas outside

The comparative analyses of selected aspects of conservation and management of Vietnam’s national parks

The national parks in Vietnam are protected areas in the national system of special-use forests created to protect natural resources and biodiversity. In order to improve the effectiveness of management of national parks, the study assesses some current aspects of conservation and management of natural resources with respect to management plans, financial sources, staff, cooperative activities, causes of limited management capacity and threats to natural resources. Out of the total of 30 national parks, six are under the responsibility of the Vietnam Administration of Forestry (VNFOREST) and 24 national parks are managed by provincial authorities. It was found that most of the national parks have updated their management plans. Financial sources of funding for national parks mainly originated from the central and provincial budgets, with an average of 51% and 76% respectively. Fifty percent of national parks spent 40–60% of their total funding on conservation activities. About 85% of national parks’ staff had academic degrees, typically in the fields of forestry, agriculture and fisheries. Biodiversity conservation was considered a priority cooperative action in national parks with scientific institutes. Major causes of a limited management capacity of national parks included human population growth and pressure associated with resources use, lack of funding, limited human and institutional capacity and land use conflict/land grab. Illegal hunting, trapping, poaching and fishing, the illegal wildlife trade, illegal logging and firewood collecting appeared to be the most serious threats to the conservation and management of natural resources. In addition to these results, significant differences were found between the VNFOREST and provincial parks in terms of financial sources, staff and the threat of illegal logging and firewood collecting. The authors’ findings offer useful information for national park planners and managers, as well as policy makers and researchers in seeking solutions for the sustainable management of natural resources in national parks

Integrating livelihoods and conservation in protected areas: Understanding the role and stakeholder views on prospects for non-timber forest products, a Bangladesh case study

Protected areas (PAs) represent a key global strategy in biodiversity conservation. In tropical developing countries, the management of PAs is a great challenge as many contain resources on which local communities rely. Collection and trading of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) is a well-established forest-based livelihood strategy, which has been promoted as a potential means for enhanced conservation and improved rural livelihoods in recent years, even though the sustainability or ecological implications have rarely been tested. We conducted an exploratory survey to understand the role and stakeholder views on conservation prospects and perceived ecological feasibility of NTFPs and harvesting schemes in a northeastern PA of Bangladesh, namely the Satchari National Park. Households (n = 101) were interviewed from three different forest dependency categories, adopting a stratified random sampling approach and using a semi-structured questionnaire. The study identified 13 locally important NTFPs, with five being critically important to supporting local livelihoods. Our study suggests that collection, processing and trading in NTFPs constitutes the primary occupation for about 18% of local inhabitants and account for an estimated 19% of their cash annual income. The household consensus on issues relating to NTFPs and their prospective role in conservation was surprisingly high, with 48% of respondents believing that promotion of NTFPs in the PA could have positive conservation value. The majority (71%) of households also had some understanding of the ecological implications of NTFP harvesting, sustainability (53%) and possible management and monitoring regimes (100%). With little known about their real application in the field, our study suggests further investigations are required to understand the ecological compatibility of traditional NTFP harvesting patterns and management. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Ecosystem Services in Conservation Planning: Targeted Benefits vs. Co-Benefits or Costs?

There is growing support for characterizing ecosystem services in order to link conservation and human well-being. However, few studies have explicitly included ecosystem services within systematic conservation planning, and those that have follow two fundamentally different approaches: ecosystem services as intrinsically-important targeted benefits vs. substitutable co-benefits. We present a first comparison of these two approaches in a case study in the Central Interior of British Columbia. We calculated and mapped economic values for carbon storage, timber production, and recreational angling using a geographical information system (GIS). These ‘marginal’ values represent the difference in service-provision between conservation and managed forestry as land uses. We compared two approaches to including ecosystem services in the site-selection software Marxan: as Targeted Benefits, and as Co-Benefits/Costs (in Marxan's cost function); we also compared these approaches with a Hybrid approach (carbon and angling as targeted benefits, timber as an opportunity cost). For this analysis, the Co-Benefit/Cost approach yielded a less costly reserve network than the Hybrid approach (1.6% cheaper). Including timber harvest as an opportunity cost in the cost function resulted in a reserve network that achieved targets equivalently, but at 15% lower total cost. We found counter-intuitive results for conservation: conservation-compatible services (carbon, angling) were positively correlated with each other and biodiversity, whereas the conservation-incompatible service (timber) was negatively correlated with all other networks. Our findings suggest that including ecosystem services within a conservation plan may be most cost-effective when they are represented as substitutable co-benefits/costs, rather than as targeted benefits. By explicitly valuing the costs and benefits associated with services, we may be able to achieve meaningful biodiversity conservation at lower cost and with greater co-benefits

The role of protected areas in the avoidance of anthropogenic conversion in a high pressure region : a matching method analysis in the core region of the brazilian cerrado

Global efforts to avoid anthropogenic conversion of natural habitat rely heavily on the establishment of protected areas. Studies that evaluate the effectiveness of these areas with a focus on preserving the natural habitat define effectiveness as a measure of the influence of protected areas on total avoided conversion. Changes in the estimated effectiveness are related to local and regional differences, evaluation methods, restriction categories that include the protected areas, and other characteristics. The overall objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of protected areas to prevent the advance of the conversion of natural areas in the core region of the Brazil’s Cerrado Biome, taking into account the influence of the restriction degree, governmental sphere, time since the establishment of the protected area units, and the size of the area on the performance of protected areas. The evaluation was conducted using matching methods and took into account the following two fundamental issues: control of statistical biases caused by the influence of covariates on the likelihood of anthropogenic conversion and the non-randomness of the allocation of protected areas throughout the territory (spatial correlation effect) and the control of statistical bias caused by the influence of auto-correlation and leakage effect. Using a sample design that is not based on ways to control these biases may result in outcomes that underestimate or overestimate the effectiveness of those units. The matching method accounted for a bias reduction in 94–99% of the estimation of the average effect of protected areas on anthropogenic conversion and allowed us to obtain results with a reduced influence of the auto-correlation and leakage effects. Most protected areas had a positive influence on the maintenance of natural habitats, although wide variation in this effectiveness was dependent on the type, restriction, governmental sphere, size and age group of the unit