The relevance and resilience of protected areas in the Anthropocene

Abstract

People’s dominance of ecosystems is changing conservation. Issues of revenue, food security, human wellbeing, and equity dominate political decisions. Protected areas are increasingly expected to justify their existence by demonstrating that they both conserve biodiversity and provide benefits that can compete with those offered by alternative land uses. In navigating the Anthropocene, four themes are particularly important: (1) protected areas are complex social-ecological systems and must be treated as such; (2) parks are under particular pressure in the most biodiverse parts of the world, and their value and effectiveness must be rigorously demonstrated to retain political support; (3) most protected areas are not isolated landscape elements, but rather members of networks that contribute to current and future human wellbeing at a wide variety of scales; and (4) if protected areas are to offer a sustainable strategy for the future of biodiversity through the Anthropocene, we will need to periodically re-evaluate, re-negotiate, and re-envision their social and their ecological roles to ensure that they remain relevant. Enhancing protected area resilience will require recognizing and managing the spatial connections between protected areas and their surroundings; resolving the challenge of managing for biodiversity in situations of conflict and poor governance; understanding and providing for the reliance of the poor on ecosystem goods and services in times of crisis; and making people aware of the importance of protected areas for their own wellbeing.

Introduction

We now live in the Anthropocene, an era in which human influence extends to every corner of the globe (Crutzen 2006). Among the distinguishing features of the Anthropocene are an expanding human population and an ever-increasing demand for land for human settlements, infrastructure, and food production (Steffen et al., 2007). These trends can be expected to continue at least until the size of the human population has leveled off; medium growth scenarios place this point around 2060–2080 (Kc and Lutz, 2014, United Nations, 2013). Although some exceptions exist – in parts of Western Europe, for example, farmland is being abandoned and restored (Navarro and Pereira, 2015) – human demand for land and introductions of non-native species, particularly in the developing world, mean that the most biodiverse terrestrial habitats are on average being converted to anthropogenic habitat types quite rapidly (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2015, Margono et al., 2014). Intensive agriculture (the ‘land sparing’ paradigm), with its heavy reliance on fertilisers and pesticides, seems unlikely to provide a long-term solution to the demand for land (Cordell and White, 2014). As the urban population becomes proportionally larger, cities are upscaling human impacts (such as agriculture and resource extraction) while people are increasingly becoming detached from nature (Cumming et al., 2014b). Nor are our impacts limited to terrestrial environments; human alterations to wetlands and marine environments, through such impacts as water extraction, overfishing, ocean acidification, and the creation of dead zones from agricultural runoff, are of similarly high concern (Boonstra et al., 2015, Comeau et al., 2014, Diaz and Rosenberg, 2008, Dudgeon, 2014). From the perspective of biodiversity, well-documented and increasing biodiversity loss, resource consumption, climate change, nitrification, alien invasive species introductions, and over-exploitation suggest a bleak ecological outlook under global change (Butchart et al., 2010). With human demands for land, water, food, and other resources high and increasing, it seems obvious that many regions will not retain their biodiversity unless it is given some form of deliberate protection.

Protected areas (PAs) remain one of society’s most important strategies for biodiversity conservation. They have traditionally been ‘natural’ areas, locations that have either retained a high proportion of their historical biodiversity, structure, and function or can potentially be restored to such a state. Conservation efforts are driven by human values, and ‘historical’ in this definition is context-dependent; its meaning may range from ‘prior to modern human settlement’ (e.g., conserving old-growth forest in remote areas in Brazil) through to ‘prior to the anthropocene’ (e.g., conserving orchids in European pastures).

In this time of pressure on ecosystems and natural resources, the conservation movement has focused on the priorities of (1) maintaining natural areas within the mosaic of human activities by placing them under protected status; (2) trying to maintain or enhance the biodiversity of areas outside natural areas, for example by greening farmlands and cities; and (3) trying to improve environmental quality in areas, such as rivers and oceans, in which traditional boundary-based approaches to conservation are less easy to apply. These priorities have resulted in a gradual extension of conservation efforts to encompass a much greater variety of protected area types and protection agreements.

As triage of natural land continues, with powerful actors demanding expansion of human activities to meet developmental goals for food, fuel, and mining outputs, protected areas will increasingly have to justify their own existence by demonstrating that they both conserve biodiversity and provide benefits that can compete with those offered by alternative land uses (Mascia and Pailler, 2011, Mascia et al., 2014). Being competitive means not only demonstrating that protected areas are achieving their stated goal of biodiversity conservation but also documenting and quantifying the diversity, volumes, and values of the services that they provide, both locally and regionally. For example, we now know that forests contribute to carbon storage and climate regulation (Dobbs et al., 2011, Ninan and Inoue, 2013); increased numbers of pollinators in natural habitats improve agricultural production (Gallai et al., 2009, Zhang et al., 2007); bats and spiders can reduce the burden of pest insects on crops (Boyles et al., 2011); the protection of natural habitats in mountainous catchments helps to ensure water supply to lower-lying areas (Abell et al., 2007); and game viewing and hiking provide cultural services that can, through park entry, accommodation, and trail fees, provide potentially valuable income streams for local communities (Daniel et al., 2012, Nahuelhual et al., 2013).

In addition to these and related services, discussed later in this article, protected areas also provide us with a form of insurance; by retaining functional ecosystems we conserve both the services that they currently provide and their likely future role in repopulating and restoring ecosystems in degraded areas. Awareness of this rescue function is particularly important in the Anthropocene, in which we risk trading our current quality of life against that of our children and grandchildren.

Given current trends in the demand for land and the relevance of protected areas, which seem likely to persist for the foreseeable future, what is the role of protected areas in the Anthropocene? If the bulk of the human population constitutes urban-dwelling consumers with a ‘nature for people’ attitude and little contact with the natural world (Pergams and Zaradic, 2008), will protected areas lose their relevance to the human society that determines their future? And if protected areas are indeed important elements of both the current and future resilience of social-ecological systems, and hence of human survival and wellbeing, how can we both enhance their resilience and re-frame their role in society and socioeconomic systems to make them more likely to persist? Is it possible to reconcile a desire for a quality of life in which biodiversity is accessible through direct, first-hand experience with the basic demands of the growing population for shelter and the production of food and fibre?

In thinking through the relevance of protected areas for the Anthropocene, and the relevance of the Anthropocene for protected areas, four themes emerge as being of particular salience. First, protected areas are complex social-ecological systems and must be treated and managed as such (Cumming et al., 2014a). Second, many parks are or will soon be under pressure from downgrading, downsizing, or degazettement in many of the most biodiverse parts of the world (Mascia et al., 2014). Existing protected areas are not necessarily expressions of fundamental values; nor are they non-negotiable land uses in the minds of many political decision makers. Third, protected areas contribute to both current and future human wellbeing at a wide variety of scales, from local to global, and are affected by external processes across a wide range of scales; protected areas should not be seen as isolated or bounded landscape elements (Palomo et al., 2013). And fourth, if protected areas are to offer a sustainable strategy for the future of biodiversity, the onset of the Anthropocene in the context of my first three points suggests that we need to renegotiate and possible re-envision their roles, both social and ecological.

In what follows I will expand on each of these themes and then seek to unite them to offer a cohesive perspective on the relevance and resilience of protected areas in the Anthropocene. My perspective throughout this discussion will be that although protected areas may not provide benefits to all people all of the time, they are a source of regional social-ecological resilience, both now and in the future, that is likely to be integral to our future wellbeing as a global society.