Abstract
Since 2005 until today, experience has been gained in the preparation, implementation and impacts of the evaluation of the management effectiveness of German national parks. This process began with the development of a quality set containing fields of action, criteria, standards and a questionnaire to assess the state of national park management. This quality set was applied in the first voluntary full evaluation of German national parks, which took place from 2009 to 2012. An assessment of the full evaluation and the following interim evaluation (2015–2018) demonstrated the positive effects of the evaluation for the national parks, but also revealed some weaknesses of the quality set and the evaluation process. For this reason, work has been underway since 2019 to further improve the evaluation method; however, this has not yet been completed. The article provides an overview of the entire process. It concludes with considerations on the transferability of the evaluation method to other countries and gives some recommendations as to the most important aspects to be considered when evaluating the management effectiveness of national parks.
Highlights
The worldwide decline of biodiversity led to the adoption of the Convention on BiologicalDiversity (CBD) [1] at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro
The evaluation criteria and the process were defined, the second project encompassed the evaluation of all national parks, the third an interim evaluation carried out five years after the full evaluation and the fourth, still ongoing project is dedicated to the improvement of the quality set and the evaluation process, building upon the experiences of the second and third projects
Results of the interim evaluation of German national parks: Degree of implementation of measures recommended during the full evaluation, depending on the allocation of competence for measures recommended during the full evaluation, depending on the allocation of competence for the respective measure. © Nationale Naturlandschaften e.V
Summary
The worldwide decline of biodiversity led to the adoption of the Convention on BiologicalDiversity (CBD) [1] at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. In 2004, the 7th Conference of the Parties to the CBD (COP 7) adopted the “Programme of Work on Protected Areas” [2], which emphasizes the importance of protected areas for achieving the objectives of the Convention and requests that by 2015 management effectiveness evaluations be carried out for at least 60% of the total protected area of each signatory state. A large number of evaluation systems for protected areas exist [3,4,5]. To fulfill the above mentioned requirements of the CBD, EUROPARC Deutschland (hereafter referred to as EUROPARC Germany), the umbrella organization of Germany’s large protected areas, supported by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN, Bundesamt für Naturschutz), initiated For the German large-scale protected areas (national parks, biosphere reserves and nature parks) different criteria sets and evaluation systems have been established and compared by Scherfose 2013 [8], whereas Coad et al 2013 [9] and Gannon et al 2019 [10] report on global progress in the evaluation of protected areas.
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