1.Front section - IUCN

chapter 15
© Jeffrey A. McNeely
Some conclusions and ways ahead
by Jeffrey A. McNeely
This book has contained numerous examples of
economic sectors and institutions that potentially have
an interest in supporting protected areas, ensuring that
they are managed effectively, and enabling them to
contribute to the full range of ecosystem services. This
chapter brings together some of the main lessons
learned from the previous chapters, and thereby
contributes to the Programme of Work on Protected
Areas agreed under the Convention on Biological
Diversity.
Because people have occupied virtually the entire
land surface of the world for thousands of years, no
“unoccupied” land is available, and the biodiversity
that is found today is the result of a long history of
interaction between people and the rest of nature. But
modern society has brought expanding populations,
global markets, and new pressures on land and
resources. Protected areas are an essential element of
the strategies of modern societies to ensure that
resources are used sustainably and biodiversity is
conserved for present and future generations.
Protected areas provide a wide range of economic,
social, cultural, recreational, scientific and spiritual
services. These services provide very considerable
economic benefits, ranging from tourism
development to carbon sequestration to watershed
protection. For example, for many protected areas,
direct revenues from tourism far exceed the
management budget, though revenue to protected
areas themselves tends to be relatively modest
because of low admission fees. The economic benefits
from watershed protection often are even greater,
though means of capturing such benefits by protected
areas remain elusive. The configuration of the
benefits from ecosystem services will vary with the
distance from the site. For example, products
harvested directly from the forest are likely to be of
greatest interest to communities in or near the buffer
zone, while recreational opportunities and water
supplies may be of greatest interest to nearby towns
and cities. The existence value of tropical rainforest
species such as tigers or rhinos is often appreciated
more in big cities or industrialized countries than in or
near the forest itself (van Schaik and Kramer, 1997),
so rural communities are unlikely to be as concerned
about threatened species as scientists or nature
advocates living in urban centres might be.
Inevitably, a protected area will enhance certain
types of economic opportunities, such as tourism or
recreational home building, while hampering others
such as logging and mining. Some rural communities
have been devastated by the closing of mining and
timber operations and others have had to face social
and infrastructural problems of rapid growth brought
on by increased tourism and associated construction.
Thus New York’s Adirondack Biosphere Reserve,
with several resort towns including Lake Placid, saw a
dramatic increase in the proportion of service and
retail trade jobs and a rapid decline in the number of
manufacturing jobs during the same period.
Photo: Elephants on savannah, Africa.
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