Protected Areas Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Protected Areas Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Protected areas come in many forms with many purposes. They may be tens of thousands of square miles in size, or less than a couple of acres (10,000 square meters). They may be strictly protected with no visitors allowed, or they may be multiple use areas that protect wildlife. They may also allow extensive recreation, or they may be complex, long-settled landscapes with historic, scenic, and cultural values. The global diversity of protected areas is one of their strengths. Few would deny protected areas a strong place in conservation and environmental management. But there is debate over which kinds of protected areas are best, and how they should be planned and managed.

History

The earliest protected areas were probably local, often communally and informally designated sites consisting of areas that had cultural, spiritual, or subsistence value. Similar areas remain in the traditions and practices of many peoples around the world today. For centuries there were also areas protected for the maintenance of specific resources, usually for societal elites, e.g., the game, timber, or furbearer reserves established in many parts of Europe and Asia over the last 1,000 years and more.

The modern history of protected areas is usually seen as beginning in the early to mid-19th century with the development of major urban parks in cities such as London, New York, and Montreal. They were seen as benefiting urban populations, fostering social improvement and public health.

These areas served as places to exercise and take in the fresh air as well as backdrops for cultural events. By the mid-19th century, the public called for areas to be set aside to serve as large parks that would protect scenic and natural wonders such as Niagara Falls, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Banff. In the 1860-80s, the United States, Canada, and Australia would become some of the first countries to establish state or national provincial parks. The parks were not only a way to enjoy the outdoors but were great opportunities for tourism. The timing was just right as the newly completed railroads provided tourists a way to reach these destinations.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries also saw the first wildlife and migratory bird sanctuaries, which were often tied to early conservation efforts and then later to the Canada/U.S. International Migratory Bird Convention of 1916. It was a time of national and state park growth as well as the beginning of wildlife research and a strengthened conservation focus for many protected areas. This emphasis was picked up again after World War II and the postwar growth period of the 1950s. North American-style parks were created in a few places in the early 20th century, notably in many parts of south and east Africa. But it was not until the post-World War II era-when European colonies gained independence and the influence of the environmental movement grew-that they became a global phenomenon. Beginning in the late 1960s, most national parks were strongly protectionist of biodiversity and exclusionary of people.

Special Types

Other types of protected areas have also developed since the 1960s, paralleling the growth in environmental and other preservation movements, including historical and cultural movements. Most national and subnational jurisdictions have protected area systems that preserve historic resources. Some have special protected areas for indigenous people and their traditional cultures, e.g., Brazil and Australia. Many European nations have protected areas that include human populations and their traditional activities, scenery, and wildlife, sometimes called working landscapes. Examples include many British national parks, U.S. coastlines, and Canadian rivers. Other areas, such as the Russian zakazniks, are focused on sustaining particular resources and their traditional uses, e.g., furbearers, trees, or reeds. Still other areas aim to offer strict protection of important features and resources, such as ecological reserves in Canada or zapouedniks in Russia.

Protected areas can also include marine areas. In the 1930s, the first designated marine areas were located in the Caribbean. Beginning in the 1960s, more marine areas were designated as protected areas, including Australia’s famous Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It is only in the last 10 years or so that the campaign for marine protected areas has achieved a higher profile. Marine protected areas, however, still lag far behind terrestrial protected areas in numbers and area. This is due to a range of factors from lack of knowledge and public profile, to the almost universal opposition of fishing interests to strict (no-take) protections, or even more moderate ones.

Organizations and Programs

International designations have been created to recognize especially significant existing protected areas around the world, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) cultural and natural world heritage sites. The UNESCO Man and the Biosphere reserve system seeks to develop a global network of core protected areas with buffer and transition zones that allow local traditional activities to continue alongside conservation, research, and tourism. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands recognizes globally significant wetlands already protected by national and other governments.

A study of protected areas cannot overlook the ones that are privately owned and managed. These areas may serve many purposes but usually entail a mix of conservation, recreation, and resource production. They may be owned by major nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the North American Nature Conservancy, local land trusts, individuals, and corporations. In some countries such as Costa Rica and Australia, governmental programs exist to recognize and assist protected areas.

Planning and Management

The planning and management of protected areas continue to face many challenges. The term protected areas connotes different meanings in different places, and there is confusion as to which areas are protected. The World Conservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, England, seeks to track global protected areas, and uses a standard set of categories developed by the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas. This typology comprises six categories and is under review. It has been much discussed recently, in part due to its relative emphasis on governmentowned, strictly protected areas along the national and state/provincial park model.

Another challenge to protected areas in the last 20 years is the decline of governmental funding in the management of these areas, which has resulted in the privatization of management and services. This puts pressure on revenue generation, which often leads to increased fees for entry and participation in educational activities. This raises issues of equity in terms of who can access the protected areas and how many derive educational benefit from visiting. Another critical challenge of great complexity is how global environmental change will affect the ecosystems, wildlife, recreational resources, and peoples that protected areas have been established to protect.

Cooperative Management

Possibly the critical challenge for protected areas globally, including in developed countries, is expanding protected areas to facilitate protected area systems that form networks and are ecologically connected, while also not harming the livelihoods of local people-whether hunter-gatherers or commercial ranchers. In many parts of the world, interest is growing in working landscape models and others that involve and provide benefits for local people, such as integrated conservation and development projects. Cooperative management and tourism development with local indigenous peoples, such as those in the Canadian North and Costa Rica, are increasingly common. The future of protected areas as global tools for biodiversity conservation may well depend on whether they can also become agents for local development and capacity building, and also be flexible enough to function in various cultural, economic, and political contexts.

Bibliography:

R. Brechin et al., eds., Contested Nature: Promoting International Biodiversity with Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (SUNY Press, 2003);
Bushell and P.F.J. Eagles, Tourism and Protected Areas: Benefits Beyond Boundaries (CABI Publishing, 2006);
Karen Jones and John Wills, The Invention of the Park: Recreational Landscapes from the Garden of Eden to Disney’s Magic Kingdom (Polity Press, 2005);
Michael Lockwood, Graeme Worboys, and Ashish Kothari, Managing Protected Areas: A Global Guide (Earthscan, 2006);
Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley, Partnerships for Protection: New Strategies for Planning and Management for Protected Areas (Earthscan, 1999).