A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

PART II
Protected Areas for Small Islands
Protection and management of island habitats themselves may also demand some
baseline studies, so that changes in vegetation and animal life can be detected early
enough to avert lasting damage. Establishing environmental monitoring on islands
to protect their habitats is as essential as such monitoring is in national parks. Under
the “user pays” principle, funding of such essential activities should be provided by
those who enjoy the protected habitats-usually tourists-and by such mechanisms as
airport taxes, hotel taxes, and taxes on exposed film at departure points.
Apply guidelines selectively.
Applications of the above suggestions for protecting island habitats must vary
according to the degree that human activity has already affected them. Wace (1979)
presents detailed suggestions for different islands worldwide.
All premises should be addressed, seeking especially to develop some resourceand
energy-conserving agroecosystems, with small energy inputs and high nutrient
reuse, incorporating the human population into the system. This may be progressively
more difficult, according to whether the islands have one or more of the following
features:
– Subsistence or local trading economies
– Large-scale developed plantations or single crop intensive agriculture
– Significant numbers of tourists or military bases or other high energy capitalintensive
uses by outsiders
– Populations consuming imported products.
If island habitats and their native species are to be conserved, development must
integrate wild nature with ongoing human activities, and preferably locally based
activities. On inhabited or exploited islands, developments should integrate people
with nature by favoring small-scale systems of local food and energy production, waste
disposal, and recycling. Centralized energy generation systems that rely on a single
energy source and long-distance transport (notably energy imports in the form of oil)
are expensive to import, store, and distribute. Similarly, importing food and essential
supplies to islands is expensive, and distributing supplies (like oil fuel) directly
destroys terrestrial environments through highway and power line construction.
A central idea of this discussion is that protecting island habitats involves the
social well being and the political realities of the human community living on or near
the protected habitats. People are more obviously and immediately a part of nature
on inhabited islands than they are on continents, but trying to arrange for their
cooperation and understanding is not always easy, as shown by the Turtle Islands Case
History (Part III, Case No. 17).
Given the limitations of islands for human population growth, decentralized,
small-scale, dispersed systems of food and energy production and waste disposal are
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