Protected area


Protected areas or conservation areas are locations that receive protection because of their recognized natural or cultural values. Protected areas are those areas in which human presence or the exploitation of natural resources is limited.
The term "protected area" also includes marine protected areas and transboundary protected areas across multiple borders. As of 2016, there are over 161,000 protected areas representing about 17 percent of the world's land surface area.
For waters under national jurisdiction beyond inland waters, there are 14,688 Marine Protected Areas, covering approximately 10.2% of coastal and marine areas and 4.12% of global ocean areas. In contrast, only 0.25% of the world's oceans beyond national jurisdiction are covered by MPAs.
In recent years, the 30 by 30 initiative has targeted to protect 30% of ocean territory and 30% of land territory worldwide by 2030; this has been adopted by the European Union in its Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, Campaign for Nature; which promoted the goal during the Convention on Biodiversity's COP15 Summit and the G7. In December 2022, Nations have reached an agreement with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at the COP15, which includes the 30 by 30 initiative.
Protected areas are often implemented for biodiversity conservation, providing habitat and protection from hunting for threatened and endangered species. Protection helps maintain ecological processes that cannot survive in most intensely managed landscapes and seascapes. Indigenous peoples and local communities frequently criticize this method of fortress conservation for the generally violent processes by which the regulations of the areas are enforced.

IUCN definition

The definition that has been widely accepted across regional and global frameworks has been provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in its categorisation guidelines for protected areas. The definition is as follows:
A clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.

Protected areas and climate change

Protected Areas alleviate climate change effects in a variety of ways:
  • Prohibition of degradative activities including: fishing, hunting, development, agriculture, mining, logging, and sometimes entry.
  • Reduction in: shifts in species distribution, intensity of storms, and impacts of sea level rise.
  • Combats ocean acidification by: maintaining coastal primary producers, increasing teleost biomass, and increasing natural carbon sequestration via the biological pump
  • Increased: populations, species resilience, genetic diversity, and potential for adaptations, lowering the risk of extinction

    Protection of natural resources

The objective of protected areas is to conserve biodiversity and to provide a way for measuring the progress of such conservation. Protected areas will usually encompass several other zones that have been deemed important for particular conservation uses, such as Important Bird Areas and Endemic Bird Areas, Centres of Plant Diversity, Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas, Alliance for Zero Extinction Sites and Key Biodiversity Areas among others. Likewise, a protected area or an entire network of protected areas may lie within a larger geographic zone that is recognised as a terrestrial or marine ecoregions, or a Crisis Ecoregions for example. As a result, Protected Areas can encompass a broad range of governance types. A wide variety of rights-holders and stakeholders are involved in the governance and management of protected areas, including forest protected areas, such as government agencies and ministries at various levels, elected and traditional authorities, indigenous peoples and local communities, private individuals and non-profit trusts, among others. Most protected-area and forest management institutions acknowledge the importance of recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, sharing the costs and benefits of protected areas and actively involving them in their governance and management. This has led to the recognition of four main types of governance, defined on the basis of who holds authority, responsibility, and who can be held accountable for the key decisions for protected areas. Indeed, governance of protected areas has emerged a critical factor in their success.
Subsequently, the range of natural resources that any one protected area may guard is vast. Many will be allocated primarily for species conservation whether it be flora or fauna or the relationship between them, but protected areas are similarly important for conserving sites of cultural importance and considerable reserves of natural resources such as;
  • Carbon stocks: Carbon emissions from deforestation account for an estimated 20% of global carbon emissions, so in protecting the worlds carbon stocks greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and longterm land cover change is prevented, which is an effective strategy in the struggle against global warming. Of all global terrestrial carbon stock, 15.2% is contained within protected areas. Protected areas in South America hold 27% of the world's carbon stock, which is the highest percentage of any continent in both absolute terms and as a proportion of the total stock.
  • Rainforests: 18.8% of the world's forest is covered by protected areas and sixteen of the twenty forest types have 10% or more protected area coverage. Of the 670 ecoregions with forest cover, 54% have 10% or more of their forest cover protected under IUCN Categories I – VI.
  • Mountains: Nationally designated protected areas cover 14.3% of the world's mountain areas, and these mountainous protected areas made up 32.5% of the world's total terrestrial protected area coverage in 2009. Mountain protected area coverage has increased globally by 21% since 1990 and out of the 198 countries with mountain areas, 43.9% still have less than 10% of their mountain areas protected.
Annual updates on each of these analyses are made in order to make comparisons to the Millennium Development Goals and several other fields of analysis are expected to be introduced in the monitoring of protected areas management effectiveness, such as freshwater and marine or coastal studies which are currently underway, and islands and drylands which are currently in planning.

Protection of biodiversity

The effectiveness of protected areas to protect biodiversity can be estimated by comparing population changes over time. Such an analysis found that the abundance of 2,239 terrestrial vertebrate populations changed at slower rate in protected areas. On average, vertebrate populations declined five times more slowly within protected areas than at similar sites lacking protection.

Protection of ecosystem services

Along with providing important stocks of natural resources, protected areas are often major sources of vital ecosystem services, unbeknownst to human society. Although biodiversity is usually the main reason for constructing protected areas, the protection of biodiversity also protects the ecosystem services society enjoys. Some ecosystem services include those that provide and regulate resources, support natural processes, or represent culture. Provisioning services provide resources to humanity, such as fuel and water, while regulating services include carbon sequestration, climate regulation, and protection against disease. Supporting ecosystem services include nutrient cycling, while cultural services are a source of aesthetic and cultural value for tourism and heritage. Such services are often overlooked by humanity, due to the ecosystem from which they originate being far from urbanized areas. The contamination of ecosystem services within a designated area ultimately degrades their use for society. For example, the protection of a water body inherently protects that water body's microorganisms and their ability to adequately filter pollutants and pathogens, ultimately protecting water quality itself. Therefore, the implementation of protected areas is vital to maintaining the quality and consistency of ecosystem services, ultimately allowing human society to function without the interference of human infrastructure or policies.

IUCN Protected Area Management Categories

Through its World Commission on Protected Areas, the IUCN has developed six Protected Area Management Categories that define protected areas according to their management objectives, which are internationally recognised by various national governments and the United Nations. The categories provide international standards for defining protected areas and encourage conservation planning according to their management aims.
IUCN Protected Area Management Categories:
Protected areas are cultural artifacts, and their story is entwined with that of human civilization. Protecting places and natural resources is by no means a modern concept, whether it be indigenous communities guarding sacred sites or the convention of European hunting reserves. 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 and in parts of Africa.
The oldest legally protected reserve recorded in history is the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, established by an ordinance dated 13 April 1776. Other sources mention the 1778 approval of a protected area on then-Khan Uul, a mountain previous protected by local nomads for centuries in Mongolia, by then-ruling Qing China Tenger Tetgegch Khaan. However, the mass protected areas movement did not begin until late nineteenth-century in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, when 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.
The designation of protected areas often also contained a political statement. In the 17th and 18th centuries, protected areas were mostly hunting grounds of rulers and thus, on the one hand, an expression of the absolute personal authority of a monarch, and on the other hand, they were concentrated in certain places and diminished with increasing spatial distance from the seat of power. In the late 19th century, modern territorial states emerged which, thanks to the transport and communication technologies of industrialisation and the closely meshed and well-connected administrative apparatus that came with it, could actually assert claims to power over large contiguous territories. The establishment of nature reserves in mostly peripheral regions thus became possible and at the same time underpinned the new state claim to power.
Initially, protected areas were recognised on a national scale, differing from country to country until 1933, when an effort to reach an international consensus on the standards and terminology of protected areas took place at the International Conference for the Protection of Fauna and Flora in London. At the 1962 First World Conference on National Parks in Seattle the effect the Industrial Revolution had had on the world's natural environment was acknowledged, and the need to preserve it for future generations was established.
Since then, it has been an international commitment on behalf of both governments and non-government organisations to maintain the networks that hold regular revisions for the succinct categorisations that have been developed to regulate and record protected areas. In 1972, the Stockholm Declaration of 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 programmes. This has become a core principle of conservation biology and has remained so in recent resolutions – including the World Charter for Nature in 1982, the Rio Declaration at the Earth Summit in 1992, and the Johannesburg Declaration 2002.
Recently, the importance of protected areas has been brought to the fore at the threat of human-induced global heating and the understanding of the necessity to consume natural resources in a sustainable manner. The spectrum of benefits and values of protected areas is recognised not only ecologically, but culturally through further development in the arena of Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas. ICCAs are "natural and/or modified ecosystems containing significant bio - diversity values and ecological services, voluntarily conserved by indigenous and local communities, through customary laws or other effective means".
As of December 2022, 17% of land territory and 10% of ocean territory were protected. At the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference almost 200 countries, signed onto the agreement which includes protecting 30% of land and oceans by 2030.