Integrating protected areas into climate planning

Abstract

Though protected areas have grown considerably over the last 130 years, there are several troubling trends, including national and regional disparities, ecological gaps, a decline in the growth of new protected areas, and problems with ineffective management. At the same time, society increasingly expects protected areas to provide an expanded array of benefits, including climate mitigation, resilience and adaptation. This poses three main questions for policy makers. The first question is where new protected areas should be located in order to maximise climate change resilience, adaptation and mitigation. Planners can incorporate climate change into ecological gap assessments (e.g. by incorporating climate-related data and carbon sequestration into their algorithms), as well as consider basic climate-related design features in the layout of new protected areas. The second question is how protected areas should be managed to maximise climate change resilience, mitigation and adaptation. Planners can explicitly include climate-related issues in their management plans, management effectiveness assessments, threat assessments, monitoring, research and capacity-building programs. The third is what factors and policies are necessary to enable protected areas to maximise climate resilience, adaptation and mitigation. Planners can better integrate protected area planning into sectoral planning such as transportation, energy and invasive species; assess and communicate the full economic value of protected areas in addressing climate-related issues such as national food and water security; and ensure that protected areas are an integral part of climate adaptation planning. Although there are potential tradeoffs between managing protected areas for biodiversity and for climate, the overwhelming societal, economic and ecological benefits of protected areas make them a natural and cost-effective investment.