Abstract
AbstractIncreasing the coverage of effectively managed protected areas (PAs) is a key focus of the 2020 Aichi biodiversity targets. PA management has received considerable attention, often based on the widely held, but rarely examined, assumption that positive conservation outcomes will result from increased PA management inputs. To shed light on this assumption, we integrated data on PA management factors with 2006–2011 avoided forest degradation and deforestation across the Peruvian Amazon, using a counterfactual approach, combined with interviews and ranking exercises. We show that while increasing PA management input to Amazonian PAs tended to reduce likelihoods of forest degradation and deforestation, the associations were weak. Key challenges facing PAs ranked by PA managers included wider law enforcement, corruption and land title issues, rather than local management factors. We therefore encourage the post‐2020 conservation targets to adopt holistic approaches beyond PA management, incorporating political, institutional and governance contexts across scales.
Highlights
Protected areas (PAs) have been the cornerstone of global conservation strategies (Watson, Dudley, Segan, & Hockings, 2014)
Studies have argued that many protected areas (PAs) cannot count on sufficient investments to meet their conservation objectives (Leader-Williams & Albon, 1988; UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, 2016; Watson et al, 2014), leading some to conclude that numerous tropical PAs are merely “paper parks” (Coad et al, 2013)
We showed that most PAs across the Peruvian Amazon had implemented conservation activities by 2011, and did not exist only on paper
Summary
Protected areas (PAs) have been the cornerstone of global conservation strategies (Watson, Dudley, Segan, & Hockings, 2014). (GEF), for example, have adopted the PA Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) as reporting requirement for GEF-funded projects These premises rest on the implicit or explicit assumption that there is a strong relationship between management factors and conservation outcomes. Few studies have evaluated the links between management factors and changes in deforestation, forest fire incidence (Carranza, Manica, Kapos, & Balmford, 2014; Nolte & Agrawal, 2013) or species population trends (Geldmann et al, 2018) This is compounded by methodological difficulties of unequivocally attributing conservation outcomes to conservation interventions. We further gauge the key challenges facing PAs as perceived by stakeholders through interviews and ranking exercises To our knowledge, this is the first such study to evaluate to what degree PA management factors are associated with avoiding forest degradation, including PAs under different governance regimes. We further discuss limitations of the existing literature and propose ways forward for future research
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