Making parks make a difference: poor alignment of policy, planning and management with protected-area impact, and ways forward

Abstract

Policy and practice around protected areas are poorly aligned with the basic purpose of protection, which is to make a difference. The difference made by protected areas is their impact, defined in program evaluation as the outcomes arising from protection relative to the counterfactual of no protection or a different form of protection. Although impact evaluation of programs is well established in fields such as medicine, education and development aid, it is rare in nature conservation. We show that the present weak alignment with impact of policy targets and operational objectives for protected areas involves a great risk: targets and objectives can be achieved while making little difference to the conservation of biodiversity. We also review potential ways of increasing the difference made by protected areas, finding a poor evidence base for the use of planning and management ‘levers’ to better achieve impact. We propose a dual strategy for making protected areas more effective in their basic role of saving nature, outlining ways of developing targets and objectives focused on impact while also improving the evidence for effective planning and management.

Bright spots among the world’s coral reefs

“…Most conservation approaches aim to identify and protect places of high ecological integrity under minimal threat 8 . Yet, with escalating social and environmental drivers of change, conservation actions are also needed where people and nature coexist, especially where human impacts are already severe 9 . Here, we highlight an approach for implementing conservation in coupled human-natural systems focused on identifying and learning from outliers -places that are performing substantially better than expected, given the socioeconomic and environmental conditions they are exposed to.…”

The conservation status of marine biodiversity of the Pacific Islands of Oceania

“…However, limited information on the distribution and conservation status of marine biodiversity in the Pacific Islands reduces the effectiveness of conservation planning, including resource management (Margules and Pressey 2000, Mikkelsen and Cracraft 2001, Gill and Kemp 2002, Agardy et al 2011, Pressey et al 2015.…”

Research advances and gaps in marine planning: towards a global database in systematic conservation planning

“…As discussed above, an overarching aim of compiling and analyzing previous planning exercises is to help practitioners and policy-makers to transition from protected-area coverage to conservation impact as a measure of planning success (Bottrill and Pressey, 2012;Pressey et al, 2015). Importantly, including information about monitoring will be essential to systematically document ecological and socioeconomic impacts of planning exercises.…”