Human well-being impacts of terrestrial protected areas

By Andrew Pullin, M. Bangpan, S. Dalrymple, K. Dickson, Neal R Haddaway, J. Healey, Hanan Hauari, N. Hockley, Julia P. G. Jones, T. Knight and 2 more. Environmental Evidence, 2012

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundEstablishing Protected Areas (PAs) is among the most common conservation interventions. Protecting areas from the threats posed by human activity will by definition inhibit some human actions. However, adverse impacts could be balanced by maintaining ecosystem services or introducing new livelihood options. Consequently there is an ongoing debate on whether the net impact of PAs on human well-being at local or regional scales is positive or negative. We report here on a systematic review of evidence for impacts on human well-being arising from the establishment and maintenance of terrestrial PAs.MethodsFollowing an a priori protocol, systematic searches were conducted for evidence of impacts of PAs post 1992. After article title screening, the review was divided into two separate processes; a qualitative synthesis of explanations and meaning of impact and a review of quantitative evidence of impact. Abstracts and full texts were assessed using inclusion criteria and conceptual models of potential impacts. Relevant studies were critically appraised and data extracted and sorted according to type of impact reported. No quantitative synthesis was possible with the evidence available. Two narrative syntheses were produced and their outputs compared in a metasynthesis.ResultsThe qualitative evidence review mapped 306 articles and synthesised 34 that were scored as high quality. The quantitative evidence review critically appraised 79 studies and included 14 of low/medium susceptibility to bias. The meta-synthesis reveals that a range of factors can lead to reports of positive and negative impacts of PA establishment, and therefore might enable hypothesis generation regarding cause and effect relationships, but resulting hypotheses cannot be tested with the current available evidence.ConclusionsThe evidence base provides a range of possible pathways of impact, both positive and negative, of PAs on human well-being but provides very little support for decision making on how to maximise positive impacts. The nature of the research reported to date forms a diverse and fragmented body of evidence unsuitable for the purpose of informing policy formation on how to achieve win-win outcomes for biodiversity and human well-being. To better assess the impacts of PAs on human well-being we make recommendations for improving research study design and reporting.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ce9e6ad7a2cd0ddd03f440003be3b69fd7ad74b

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Citations in the corpus

ROSES RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses: pro forma, flow-diagram and descriptive summary of the plan and conduct of environmental systematic reviews and systematic maps (2018, background): “41 pages plus 251 pages across 10 additional files; [39]).”
The Role of Google Scholar in Evidence Reviews and Its Applicability to Grey Literature Searching (2015, methodology): “Search results were extracted for records ordered both by relevance and by publication date (newest first), with the exception of SR2, SR5 and SR7, where totals of 230, 1,058 and 1,071 records respectively (all returned) were obtained and extracted in full.”
Effects of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) on Deforestation and Poverty in Low and Middle Income Countries: A Systematic Review (2014, background): “Geldman et al. (2013) assess the effects of protected areas on environmental outcomes, while Pullin et al. (2013) focus on the human welfare outcomes of protected areas.”
Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change (2019, unknown): “For example, higher-income countries might contribute to the financing of environmental protection in lower-income countries but only to secure global benefits— such as the preservation of particular species and ecosystems, or carbon storage—whereas such policies can sometimes lower welfare locally ”
Mainstreaming Impact Evaluation in Nature Conservation (2016, background): “Even for protected areas, our understanding of spillover and heterogeneous treatment effects on environmental and socioeconomic indicators is still limited (Geldman et al. 2013; Pullin et al. 2013).”