Rd October 2010 [a] Contents

1. 
   Ecosystems
   
2. 
   Species
   
3. 
   Intra-specific genetic variation
   

4. 
   Permanent and temporary jobs in management, tourism services, administration, maintenance etc
   

5. 
   Wild game
   
6. 
   Wild food plants
   
7. 
   Fisheries (permissible fishing and maintaining fish stocks by protecting spawning area)
   
8. 
   Genetic material (e.g. crop wild relatives, tree species)
   
9. 
   Traditional agriculture (i.e. use of locally adapted crops (landraces) and/or practices)
   
10. 
    Livestock grazing and fodder collection
    

11. 
    Non-commercial water use (e.g. subsistence agriculture, drinking, cooking)
    
12. 
    Commercial water use (e.g. for large-scale irrigation, waterways, bottling plants, hydro-electric power or municipal drinking water source)
    

13. 
    Cultural and historical values (e.g. archaeology, historic buildings, land use patterns)
    
14. 
    Sacred natural sites or landscapes, pilgrimage routes
    
15. 
    Wilderness values or other similar iconic values
    

16. 
    Local medicinal resources (e.g. herbs)
    
17. 
    Genetic material for the pharmaceuticals industry
    
18. 
    Recreation and tourism
    
19. 
    Physical exercise
    
20. 
    Mental health values
    

21. 
    Resource for building knowledge
    
22. 
    Contribution to education (formal and informal dissemination of information)
    

23. 
    Climate amelioration (carbon storage and sequestration and ecosystem-based adaptation)
    
24. 
    Soil stabilisation (e.g. avalanche prevention, landslide and erosion)
    
25. 
    Coastal protection (e.g. mangroves, sand dunes, coral reefs)
    
26. 
    Flood prevention (e.g. mitigation in small watersheds, flood plains and wetlands)
    
27. 
    Water quality and quantity (e.g. filtration, groundwater renewal, natural flows)
    
28. 
    Pollination of nearby crops or pollination products such as honey
    

29. 
    Timber, including for fuelwood
    
30. 
    Other materials (e.g. coral, shells, resin, rubber, grass, rattan, minerals, etc)
    

Protected areas can support these benefits in a number of different ways, by providing:

1. 
   Protection of unique values: benefits that rely on a particular ecosystem or a landscape/seascape and therefore cannot be replaced: e.g. some aspects of biodiversity; sacredness related to particular features or traditions; appreciation of landscape.
   
2. 
   Cost effective solutions: benefits supplied most cost effectively, easily or efficiently by retaining natural ecosystems: e.g. clean water from forests; carbon storage in peat and other habitats; coastal protection through retention and restoration of mangroves
   
3. 
   Protection as an insurance policy: benefits that are important for the subsistence of poorer members of society and that can be maintained in protected areas and extracted in a sustainable manner: e.g. medical herbs; game; fish; some building materials fuel.
   
4. 
   Conservation of genetic potential: there are some species of animals and plants that are now only found surviving and continuing to adapt to changing conditions in protected areas; this in situ protection remains a vital strategy for genetic conservation. But much of our world remains unknown or unassessed by science, including species that may have high value in the future: e.g. genetic material for crop breeding and medical research.
   
5. 
   Convenient solutions: benefits that are not uniquely associated with protected areas and can be replaced in other environments but are an easy option given the existence of a protected area: e.g. use for exercise; crop pollination.
   

Virtually all protected areas support multiple values; even the strictest nature reserves will usually on closer inspection provide a wider range of benefits than is obvious at first glance. Many of these protected area benefits are currently often ignored, misunderstood and under-valued, or to be more accurate most managers are only aware of some of the benefits that their protected areas provide. We have sat many times with managers and local communities in different countries around the world and seen at first hand that the people writing the management plans are unaware of many of the values that local people hold dear. We have run assessments of protected areas where local communities, protected area staff and attendant NGOs have all identified radically different suites of values. By bringing the ‘other’ benefits more centrally into management and by making sure other stakeholders simultaneously recognise their worth perceptions about the relative value of protected areas can be altered dramatically.

Such an approach involves a certain amount of trade-offs. Spreading management to address multiple needs also often means spreading available resources unless some of the benefits can be used directly to generate income. In addition, many benefits may not remain constant over time. Some may become redundant (e.g. some subsistence values will decline in importance with economic development) or new values can be recognised (e.g. the increasing interest in protected areas as part of climate change response strategies). Some of these changes will strengthen protection regimes, others tend to undermine them. Inclusion of wider values must not ignore or underplay core values else these risk getting under-valued or ignored.

The basic premise laid out in this book is that if protected areas are to survive as a principal conservation tool, they will need to demonstrate a far wider range of benefits than has been appreciated until now: this also implies that aspects of management will have to change quite radically. In meeting these fresh challenges, managers are faced with a two step process:

1. 
   Developing ways of assessing all the values of the protected area, and their associated costs and benefits, building partnerships in order to ensure that management reflects the full range of benefits; and
   
2. 
   Ensuring that the benefits from protected areas accrue more equitably than is often the case today, particularly with respect to ensuring that benefits reach the poorest members of society and those local communities whose livelihoods are most intimately bound up with a particular protected area.
   

These tasks need to be located within a wider framework of policy, legislation and good governance. It is not always easy to ensure that protected areas are both effective at conserving biodiversity and successful at maintaining the wider range of values, and associated benefits, discussed in the previous chapters. Such changes take time and resources in terms of research, development of skills and sometimes investment in infrastructure or equipment although there should also be potential economic returns. Some initial thoughts on a strategy for realising the full suite of protected area values are outlined below.

Most governments have, one way or another, already committed to many of the ideas outlined in this book, even if they do not always recognise this. A number of important global commitments and reviews such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment already note the importance of ecosystem services and, actually or implicitly, the role played by protected areas in supplying these services. Similarly, governments have made a number of substantial commitments to protected areas through conventions such as World Heritage, Man and the Biosphere, Ramsar (for wetlands) and most important of all the CBD’s Programme of Work on Protected Areas (PoWPA). The last, a wonderfully ambitious multi-year programme, encourages governments to complete ecologically-representative protected area networks and includes a wide array of important social safeguards regarding local communities and indigenous peoples.

The equitable distribution of benefits amongst difference sectors of society is a critical factor in widespread recognition of protected area values. Often benefits fail to reach some of the very poorest within societies, such as ethnic or religious minorities, women or the elderly. On the other hand, the cost of establishing protected areas has often fallen squarely on the shoulders of poor people (Marrie, 2004). These inequalities appear between countries, within countries and within households. Unfortunately, research suggests that the majority of benefits accrue to the most wealthy, whether at the scale of a foreign-owned ecotourism company reaping healthy profits and paying local workers very little, or the better-off members of a community next to a protected area getting the lion’s share of compensation packages, trust funds or start-up projects (Dudley et al, 2008). While for those people, the benefits of a protected area really may outweigh the costs; for the poorest people impacts such as crop damage and loss of resources can mean that setting up a protected area means that they are worse off than before. These inequalities are often rooted in larger inequities in society including weak governance that provide little support for the politically, socially or physically weakest people.

As noted above, many protected area mangers do not recognise anything like the full range of benefits supplied by the land or water under their control. To an even greater extent, there can be few directors of protected area agencies who could list with confidence all the values of their system. The pressure to produce these kinds of data is growing all the time. Unfortunately, although we have referred to many individual studies of costs and benefits throughout this volume there is currently no agreed methodology for detailed cost benefit analyses that looks at all benefits and, critically, that compares with alternative management options. This is currently hampering the debate, which all too often relies on claims and counter claims without credible quantitative information to help make decisions.

One of the shortcomings identified in evaluating protected area benefits is that most studies have tended to look at one particular benefit and not tried to carry out an overall cost benefit analysis. For example, research in the Annapurna Conservation Area in Nepal found that while most people within the area recognised some benefits from conservation, such as improved infrastructure, health care etc, only 14.9 per cent received direct cash income from tourism (Bajracharya et al, 2006). If the financial benefit alone is reported, as is so often the case, then it would seem that Annapurna benefits only a few people; if the wider picture of the ‘compensatory benefits’ is reviewed then the benefits become widely applicable to many more people.

** Links between different management models in protected areas and biodiversity conservation – in this context whether increasing emphasis on broader protected area benefits will undermine biodiversity conservation and if so by how much?

** Management models for ensuring social equity and poverty reduction with respect to existing and proposed systems for accessing broader protected area benefits including in particular Payment for Environment Service schemes and REDD and other climate change amelioration schemes

** Rapid ways of assessing carbon storage and sequestration, along with ways in which ecosystems can be managed to maximise carbon capture benefits

Developing wider benefits of protected areas not only relies on better knowledge and tools but also increased capacity within protected area staff and partners. Most protected area managers are trained as ecologists and perhaps also in traditional management; in a wider model of protected area benefits they, or at least some of their staff, will need a new range of skills both in understanding values and in negotiating and implementing their exploitation. This needs to cover ecosystem goods and services that are already well understood, such as crop wild relatives and water quality but also benefits that have only been recognised more recently, including some of the climate change response contributions derived from well managed protected areas.

Knowing about the range of benefits is important for protected area agencies and for local and national governments but will not in itself help to build support from other stakeholders. A wider strategy for communicating benefits is needed, focusing in particular on:

** Local communities: that may be benefiting from services from protected areas including for example recreational groups; faith groups; people legally using non-timber forest products from protected areas; communities benefiting from water resources or flood mitigation services from protected areas

** National and local government: to understand better the potential benefits from protected areas either under their management or within territory under their influence, focusing particularly on for example wider tourism values; ecosystem values and issues relating to cultural and spiritual heritage
Such understanding can also help to grow the protected area network, including wider use of different governance types and management approaches.
[b] In closing

Protected areas offer a rare fusion of ethical and utilitarian values. At their best, they represent the high moral purpose of protecting the rest of nature from the impacts of human mismanagement, whilst at the same time they offer us some immediate and tangible rewards.

www.panda.org/what_we_do/how_we_work/protected_areas/arguments_for_protection/, accessed 29^th September 2009