National emphasis on high-level protection reduces risk of biodiversity decline in tropical forest reserves
Introduction
According to the World Database on Protected Areas (IUCN and UNEP-WCMC, 2013), as of 2013 there were over 210,000 protected areas worldwide, of which approximately 46% are managed explicitly for biodiversity protection (IUCN Categories I–IV; explained below) (Dudley, 2008). The percentage of the Earth’s land area under some form of legal protection has risen sharply from <4% in 1985 to nearly 15.4% by 2014 (Juffe-Bignoli et al., 2014).
Taken at face value, this trend is certainly a positive sign, but biodiversity is still in decline throughout most of the world, and it risks being degraded even further over the coming decades (Pimm et al., 2014). While protected areas can safeguard vegetation and minimize land-use pressures after establishment (Bruner et al., 2001, Geldmann et al., 2013, Carranza et al., 2014a), coverage is still inadequate because many endemic and threatened species are found entirely outside the global protected-area network (Rodrigues et al., 2004, Venter et al., 2014). Further, many protected areas – especially in the tropics – are failing to protect their biodiversity fully (Western et al., 2009, Laurance et al., 2012, Carranza et al., 2014b). A recent systematic review of protected-area effectiveness based on 76 studies concluded that, on average, the existence of a reserve protects at least some forest habitats, but evidence was inconclusive that they maintain populations of species better than do equivalent areas outside reserves (Geldmann et al., 2013). Patterns of deforestation inside and outside of protected areas are also highly variable among regions (Joppa et al., 2008), although Coetzee et al. (2014) determined via a global meta-analysis that protected areas generally have higher biodiversity values relative to comparable areas outside reserves.
There is a now a large and growing literature attempting to identify the conditions that promote effective conservation of biodiversity in protected areas. Quantifying such measures and correlates of success (and failure) are essential to justify continued expansion of the network and conservation investment in general (Parrish et al., 2003). The problem is that few protected areas have robust monitoring designs in place to measure biodiversity trends (Parrish et al., 2003, Ferraro and Pattanayak, 2006, Geldmann et al., 2013), such that many studies are obliged to measure proxies for ‘success’. For example, deforestation pressures outside 36 protected areas were thought to signal future conservation failures within them (Naughton-Treves et al., 2005), an expectation that was corroborated by observations of declining biodiversity within tropical protected areas where outside pressures were relatively higher (Laurance et al., 2012). On a finer scale, the greatest differences in terms of threatening processes (land clearing, logging, hunting, fire, grazing) inside and outside tropical protected areas correlated most strongly with guard density, the deterrent level focused on illegal activity, border demarcation and the presence of direct-compensation programs for local residents (Bruner et al., 2001). Likewise, a comparison of 40 tropical protected areas to 33 community-managed forests suggested lower deforestation in the latter due to their higher relative community engagement (Porter-Bolland et al., 2012). The intensity of law enforcement and NGO support were the best predictors of great ape survival among 109 resource management areas in Africa (Tranquilli et al., 2012), and enforcement was the most effective contributor to reductions in poaching in Serengeti National Park (Hilborn et al., 2006).
A recent study based on validated interviews of 262 expert biologists across the tropics was the first to provide empirical evidence of biodiversity change in a large sample of protected areas (Laurance et al., 2012). They showed that biodiversity was being substantially eroded in about half of the reserves examined, with the remainder largely ‘succeeding’ in sustaining their biodiversity. In fact, a composite reserve ‘health’ index derived from an average trend of the ten best-studied guilds indicated that most (85%) of the protected areas examined had a health index ⩽ 0, indicating a variable but generally worsening overall trend in biodiversity. Further, a simple bivariate linear model suggested that improving on-the-ground protection (management) explained the most variation in reserve health (Laurance et al., 2012).
The suggestion that general management commitment, like the presence of field researchers (Laurance, 2013) and park rangers within a particular reserve improving its biodiversity prospects (Leverington et al., 2010), is tantalizing and merits further investigation. The problem is that such fine-scale budgetary and management details are missing for most parks (Bruner et al., 2004, Coad et al., 2013), and especially for most of the tropical protected areas for which a biodiversity health index exists. At the global scale, at least, there is clear evidence that some socio-economic indicators affect the environmental performance of a country, with increasing relative national ‘wealth’ in particular leading to poorer environmental outcomes (Bradshaw et al., 2010). We therefore asked a similar question of whether the national ‘emphasis’ on protected areas accounts for some of the variation in tropical reserve health. We hypothesize that the more a country ‘invests’ in reserves designed specifically to protect local biodiversity, the lower the likelihood that its protected areas will fail to achieve that protection. We therefore compared the reserve health index of Laurance et al. (2012) to the proportion of reserves within each nation categorized by the IUCN as established primarily for the reasons of biodiversity conservation (Categories I–IV) (Joppa et al., 2008) as an index of national conservation emphasis. We also controlled for other socio-economic differences among countries including country area, human population size, wealth, wealth inequality and corruption, while simultaneously accounting for spatial and national non-independence in the dataset.
Section snippets
Reserve health
Due to the paucity of long-term biodiversity trend data in tropical protected areas, we used the published data describing the biodiversity ‘health’ of 60 pan-tropical reserves within 36 countries (Laurance et al., 2012). The health index is an integrated assessment of biodiversity trends across 10 guilds deemed sensitive to environmental changes by local experts (Laurance et al., 2012). Six of these guilds are considered ‘disturbance avoiders’ (apex predators, large non-predatory vertebrates,
Results
Many countries (22/60 = 37%) had only one protected area represented in the sample, although two countries had up to four protected areas (Brazil and Malaysia) (Fig. 1A). To visualise the relationships, the percentage of ‘high-protection’ reserves (IUCN categories Ia, b + II + IV) varied from >80% (Thailand & India) to zero (Papua New Guinea & DRC) (Fig. 1B), and the percentage of the land area protected ranged from >50% (Venezuela) to <4% (Papua New Guinea & Madagascar) (Fig. 1D) among the 36
Discussion
Our results demonstrate that a national emphasis on biodiversity conservation, as implied by the proportion of tropical forest reserves designed specifically for biodiversity protection (IUCN Categories I–IV), was the most important correlate of reserve health among the variables we examined. As a crude metric that can be applied to any country, this relative index of a country’s emphasis on protected-area quality appears to correlate with real biodiversity outcomes. Considering that a
Acknowledgments
We thank L. Joppa and the Zoological Society of London for encouraging the development of this paper. The study was funded in part by the Australian Research Council.
References (69)
- et al.
Mismatches between conservation outcomes and management evaluation in protected areas: a case study in the Brazilian Cerrado
Biol. Conserv.
(2014) Interaction effects between economic development and forest cover determine deforestation rates
Global Environ. Change
(2006)- et al.
Effectiveness of terrestrial protected areas in reducing habitat loss and population declines
Biol. Conserv.
(2013) - et al.
Beyond GDP: measuring and achieving global genuine progress
Ecol. Econom.
(2013) Does research help to safeguard protected areas?
Trends Ecol. Evol.
(2013)- et al.
Agricultural expansion and its impacts on tropical nature
Trends Ecol. Evol.
(2014) Wildlife co-management in the Bénoué National Park-Complex, Cameroon: a bumpy road to institutional development
World Develop.
(2002)- et al.
Global development and the future of the protected area strategy
Biol. Conserv.
(2011) - et al.
Community managed forests and forest protected areas: an assessment of their conservation effectiveness across the tropics
Forest Ecol. Manage.
(2012) Stakeholder participation for environmental management: a literature review
Biol. Conserv.
(2008)
Economic growth and environmental degradation: the environmental Kuznets curve and sustainable development
World Develop.
Conserving Africa’s rain forests: problems in protected areas and possible solutions
Biol. Conserv.
Effectiveness of participatory planning for community management of fisheries in Bangladesh
J. Environ. Manage.
Protected areas and local communities: an inevitable partnership toward successful conservation strategies?
Ecol. Soc.
Human population reduction is not a quick fix for environmental problems
Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA
Predictors of contraction and expansion of area of occupancy for British birds
Proc. Royal Soc. B: Biol. Sci.
Evaluating the relative environmental impact of countries
PLoS ONE
Bushmeat hunting, wildlife declines, and fish supply in West Africa
Science
Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation
Conserv. Biol.
Financial costs and shortfalls of managing and expanding protected-area systems in developing countries
BioScience
Effectiveness of parks in protecting tropical biodiversity
Science
Protected area effectiveness in reducing conversion in a rapidly vanishing ecosystem: the Brazilian Cerrado
Conserv. Lett.
Progress towards the CBD protected area management effectiveness targets
Parks
Local scale comparisons of biodiversity as a test for global protected area ecological performance: a meta-analysis
PLoS ONE
Increasing isolation of protected areas in tropical forests over the past twenty years
Ecol. Appl.
Land use change around protected areas: management to balance human needs and ecological function
Ecol. Appl.
Money for nothing? a call for empirical evaluation of biodiversity conservation investments
PLoS Biol.
Spatial climate patterns explain negligible variation in strength of compensatory density feedbacks in birds and mammals
PLoS ONE
Effective enforcement in a conservation area
Science
The impact of conservation on the status of the world’s vertebrates
Science
A cross-national analysis of how economic inequality predicts biodiversity loss
Conserv. Biol.
Cited by (28)
Assessing variation in the effectiveness of IUCN protected area categorisation. What remotely sensed forest integrity and human modification reveals across the major tropical forest biomes
2022, Ecological IndicatorsCitation Excerpt :However, these rapidly achieved analyses are necessary in providing broad-scale guidance and will continue to be important as researchers evaluate whether management designation will be a better predictor of future patterns than current ones. Though they were strongly correlated, the variance between human modification and forest integrity is likely the result of national income and population density differences between the megaregions (Bradshaw et al., 2015), parameters not assessed during this study. Cases, therefore, where PAs with varying management categories were associated with lower human modification or improved forest integrity (i.e., more optimal conservation outcomes) may not be driven by the regulatory strictness per se, but rather arose because of where the stricter protection was assigned i.e., in places experiencing lower human pressures (Ferraro et al., 2013; Pfaff et al., 2014).
Beyond total area protected: A new set of metrics to measure progress in building a robust protected area estate
2019, Global Environmental ChangeCitation Excerpt :The IUCN recognises PAs with a range of different objectives, which permit more or less high-impact human activity, through a classification system (Dudley, 2008). More strictly protected categories (e.g., Categories I & II) provide higher protection for biodiversity by excluding higher impact human activities, like resource exploitation, permitted within other IUCN categories (e.g., Category V & VI) (Bradshaw et al., 2015), and have been directly linked with better biodiversity outcomes in PAs (Edgar et al., 2014). The proportion of the total area protected within different IUCN categories therefore provides some indication of the pressure PAs are under from human activities, and the costs associated with managing associated infrastructure (e.g., visitor facilities).
Parks protect forest cover in a tropical biodiversity hotspot, but high human population densities can limit success
2018, Biological ConservationCitation Excerpt :Local resource use and infrastructure development are often subject to greater oversight within protected areas (Barber et al., 2014; Bruner et al., 2001). However, national and local motivation to protect, which affects whether protected areas successfully retain forest cover, can change with developmental trajectories influenced by international markets, national resource base, and changing economic opportunities (Bradshaw et al., 2015; Rudel, 2007). Thus, evaluating the efficacy of protected areas in retaining forest cover in a Biodiversity Hotspot in relation to demographic and development factors could provide one benchmark of whether legal protection is meeting its objectives (Roy and Srivastava, 2012).
Protected areas and the sustainable governance of forest resources
2018, Current Opinion in Environmental SustainabilityCitation Excerpt :Our review suggests a trend toward assessment of FPA networks rather than individual FPAs: 18 of the 22 quantitative studies we identified evaluated the impacts of FPA systems at a regional, national, or global scale. Ecological outcomes comprise the primary focus of these studies, with all assessing changes in forest cover except two [36,37], which used species level indicators.4 The consensus across these studies is that FPAs, generally, have been effective in advancing conservation objectives.
Conservation status of Phasianidae in Southeast Asia
2018, Biological ConservationCitation Excerpt :We have very little evidence of species' responses to hunting in the region, but at least some are thought to be quite resilient to hunting pressure where their reproductive rate is relatively high (e.g. Brickle et al., 2008). A number of proxies for hunting pressure specific to Galliformes have been suggested previously (Keane et al., 2005), both for specific areas as well as country-level socio-economic factors shown to relate to wildlife exploitation (McDonald and Boucher, 2011; Bradshaw et al., 2015). We focused on the 42 Phasianidae species found in the region (Table S1) for which there are global distribution data.
Reframing the Food–Biodiversity Challenge
2017, Trends in Ecology and EvolutionCitation Excerpt :This situation is less common, but can arise when the pursuit of narrowly defined green agendas (for example, through the top-down establishment of protected areas) impinges upon local people's livelihoods or human rights [46]. Protected areas are of global importance to biodiversity conservation, and for many rare, specialist, or large-ranging species, strictly protected areas might be the only option to conserve them [47,48]. Nevertheless, the historic fortress-conservation approach to protected area establishment has caused widespread poverty by displacing people from their homelands and restricting their access and use rights to critical resources [49–51].