1.Front section - IUCN

Friends for Life: New partners in support of protected areas
IUCN Photo Library © Jim Thorsell
Valley of Wind in Uluru National Park, Australia.
well-managed protected areas may provide new
approaches to resource management based on
sustainable use, thereby restoring at least part of the
balance that has enabled human populations to survive.
The current forces affecting
protected areas
As expressions of social and political choices about
land use, protected areas are subject to the multiple
forces affecting the relationship between people and
resources. These forces can be positive or negative, or
both simultaneously. Typically, the provisioning
service has had the greatest influence on convincing
decision makers to take an active interest in
conservation. But abundant evidence has now
demonstrated the close links between the conservation
of healthy terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the
delivery of regulating, cultural, and supporting
services. Some local communities and urban dwellers
show willingness to pay for such ecosystem services
and to adopt land use and crop production systems
that can support the protected areas; others are
indifferent, or would prefer protected areas to be
converted to “more productive” uses.
Even today, as security concerns dominate social
and political agendas (Hammill, this volume), many
countries are still creating new protected areas and
seeking innovative ways to address protected area
problems. The latest compilation of global protected
areas indicates that the area of terrestrial protected
areas has now almost reached the 12% aspired to by
the 1987 report of the World Commission on
Sustainable Development (Brundtland, 1987). But
significant management challenges remain, as many
of the newly-established protected areas remain
“paper parks”, little more than lines drawn on a map
without a supporting management capacity, and many
are found in remote mountain areas with few
alternative uses while biologically important lowland
areas remain unprotected. Positive forces of change
include the implementation plan from the 2002 World
Summit on Sustainable Development, which defined
targets in key areas that re-commit the world
community to the earlier Agenda 21 promises of the
Earth Summit and the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs). Perhaps more important is the
renewed commitment to stop biodiversity loss and to
support the role of protected areas in doing so,
through various governmental, intergovernmental,
private sector, and non-governmental organizations.
The approval by the Convention on Biological
Diversity’s 2004 Conference of Parties of a detailed
Programme of Work on Protected Areas is especially
notable in this regard.
The increased recognition of protected areas as
potential tools for economic development is another
reason why more are being established. But this also
means that more protected areas are competing for
limited funds, as both official development assistance
(ODA) and tourism income remain stagnant, if not
declining in many countries. Poverty may push people
to invade protected areas to use wild products,
possibly unsustainably, while greater wealth may lead
to even more exploitation of natural resources. Is
wealth or poverty the greater negative impact
Demographics remain a driving force affecting
protected areas, with nearly 80 million people being
added to our planet each year, mostly in developing
countries. Migration and urbanization are particular
challenges (see Tryzna, this volume). Today, about
half of the world’s 6.3 billion people live in cities, well
insulated from the realities of nature (except, of
course, from the climate). But one arguably positive
result of expanding population is that tourism to
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