Protected Areas: Pointless or Potential?

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Today there are over 150,000 protected areas in the world, and that number is consistently growing, with designated areas of land and sea increasing in the name of conservation and preservation of habitats. The Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi target #11 stresses the necessity of protected areas, setting out a goal of 17% of terrestrial and inland water to be designated as such. With under 4 years to go we’re currently closer to 12% but there has been considerable progress in the amount of land we are protecting from human land use.

But wait – biodiversity is decreasing, isn’t it? That is the point of this blog after all. We’re continuing to experience habitat and species loss and humans continue to occupy a large portion land surface. So is this prolific designation of protected areas actually doing anything? Or is the designation of land as 'protected' a purely descriptive act?

There is a growing sense amongst some conservationists that the use of protected areas as a strategy against biodiversity is without merit, and arguments of the ineffectiveness of individual PA are prolific. For example, habitat conversion rates in protected areas of South Asia are almost identical to unprotected areas. Despite a classification that seems to be all encompassing and binding, the systems inside many of these areas have continued to be modified, and are therefore not the pristine, natural systems that we would like. Potentially this is an issue of poor governance – the effectiveness of a protected area is surely in great part down to the people who manage it and the strategies in place to secure proper use of the area and ensure concerted effort from all stakeholders. Aichi Target 11 aims for “effective and equitable management”, but the historic failures of conservation will remind us that this is something that requires much work and state support.

With all this, protected areas seem a bit pointless. But it’s important to consider that there are successes – but this success is variable and dependent on a number of factors. Another key issue to consider with protected areas is the health of what is effectively left behind. As Laurence et al. set out, it has been noted that the neighbouring area immediately outside the designated area is frequently more degraded than the protected area may have been had it not been. This points to the importance of habitat connectivity – with large, interlinked areas providing greater benefit than separate smaller areas.

The hope for protected areas, I think, lies in connectivity – something that has been readily taken up by conservation organisations such as Panthera, whose Jaguar Corridor Initiative has tried to provide links between patches of forest in Costa Rica to enable jaguars to move around the country, and is beginning to see positive results in the numbers of jaguars present and the health of individuals.

So if connectivity is key, then maybe larger protected areas are the answer? In the last few weeks the Ross Sea in Antarctica joined the growing list of marine protected areas, becoming the largest of its kind at almost 1.57 million km2 and containing a no-take zone that prohibits commercial fishing in the area for 35 years in an attempt to conserve the ecosystem and its inhabitants. Of course, we’re yet to see the results of this designation and it is too early to tell whether the action will be positively enforced, but I can’t help being more hopeful for this protected area, one that provides a large, connected area for the wildlife it contains to move about in at their will, potentially removing one of the common limitations of marine protected areas as being unable to encompass migrating species. As noted in the BBC article linked, “Some countries are concerned that a marine protected area in the high seas around Antarctica would set a precedent for the rest of the world”. Maybe we should hope that it does.