Measuring the difference made by conservation initiatives: protected areas and their environmental and social impacts

Abstract

Success in conservation depends on our ability to reduce human pressures in areas that harbour biological diversity and ecosystem services. Legally protecting some of these areas through the creation of protected areas is a key component of conservation efforts globally. To develop effective protected area networks, practitioners need credible, scientific evidence about the degree to which protected areas affect environmental and social outcomes, and how these effects vary with context. Such evidence has been lacking, but the situation is changing as conservation scientists adopt more sophisticated research designs for evaluating protected areas' past impacts and for predicting their future impacts. Complementing these scientific advances, conservation funders and practitioners are paying increasing attention to evaluating their investments with more scientifically rigorous evaluation designs. This theme issue highlights recent advances in the science of protected area evaluations and explores the challenges to developing a more credible evidence base that can help societies achieve their goals of protecting nature while enhancing human welfare.

Conservation social science: Understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation

“…Indeed, the social sciences have been applied to understand diverse conservation and environmental management problems including, but not limited to, water governance (Armitage et al, 2012;Bakker, 2012;Curran, 2015), fisheries management (Heck et al, 2015;Symes and Hoefnagel, 2010;Wilson et al, 2013), agriculture landscape management (de Snoo et al, 2013), wildlife management (Clark et al, 2008;Gore et al, 2011;Teel and Manfredo, 2010), avian conservation (Kingston, 2016;Veríssimo et al, 2014), protected areas (Brockington and Wilkie, 2015;Ferraro and Pressey, 2015;Lockwood, 2010), forest management (Agrawal and Gupta, 2005;Allen et al, 2014;Ostrom and Nagendra, 2006;Stanturf et al, 2012) and marine conservation planning (Aswani and Hamilton, 2004;Ban et al, 2013;Cornu et al, 2014). The social sciences have also been used to research conservation and environmental management at all scales from local (Bennett et al, 2010) to regional (Pietri et al, 2015) and global (Fleischman et al, 2014).…”

Wilderness protected areas : management guidelines for IUCN category 1b protected areas

“…An additional topic explored in wilderness fire social science includes public attitudes towards managementignited fire in wilderness. For example, support was found for management-ignited fires with no difference between justifying those fires for ecological restoration or for protecting adjacent land resources by reducing hazardous fuels inside wilderness (Ferraro & Pressey, 2015). To understand and protect wilderness areas, managers need to be able to measure what they are trying to conserve (Stem, et al, 2005;.…”

Drivers of coral reef marine protected area performance

“…Such evaluations help us to better understand the conditions under which MPAs can achieve desired outcomes [39]. They can also inform budget allocations [16, 40], promote accountability and track progress towards broader conservation goals [34, 41].…”