High and Far: Biases in the Location of Protected Areas

By Lucas Joppa, A. Pfaff. PLoS ONE, 2009

1,045 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background About an eighth of the earth's land surface is in protected areas (hereafter “PAs”), most created during the 20th century. Natural landscapes are critical for species persistence and PAs can play a major role in conservation and in climate policy. Such contributions may be harder than expected to implement if new PAs are constrained to the same kinds of locations that PAs currently occupy. Methodology/Principal Findings Quantitatively extending the perception that PAs occupy “rock and ice”, we show that across 147 nations PA networks are biased towards places that are unlikely to face land conversion pressures even in the absence of protection. We test each country's PA network for bias in elevation, slope, distances to roads and cities, and suitability for agriculture. Further, within each country's set of PAs, we also ask if the level of protection is biased in these ways. We find that the significant majority of national PA networks are biased to higher elevations, steeper slopes and greater distances to roads and cities. Also, within a country, PAs with higher protection status are more biased than are the PAs with lower protection statuses. Conclusions/Significance In sum, PAs are biased towards where they can least prevent land conversion (even if they offer perfect protection). These globally comprehensive results extend findings from nation-level analyses. They imply that siting rules such as the Convention on Biological Diversity's 2010 Target [to protect 10% of all ecoregions] might raise PA impacts if applied at the country level. In light of the potential for global carbon-based payments for avoided deforestation or REDD, these results suggest that attention to threat could improve outcomes from the creation and management of PAs.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a6ae1b9d48a0ee304201c95cef0ff685b77839d

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Citations in the corpus

Ongoing global biodiversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas: a review of the technical and practical shortcomings of protected areas on land and sea (2011, background): “In fact, for 75% of the countries there was a strong bias toward placing PAs in areas unlikely to face habitat alteration even in the absence of protection (Joppa & Pfaff 2009, 2011).”
Forest Resources Assessment of 2015 shows positive global trends but forest loss and degradation persist in poor tropical countries (2015, background): “Yet, due to the tendency for protected areas (PAs) to be situated far from threats to forests and biodiversity (Joppa and Pfaff, 2009; Sloan et al., 2012), and given their inevitably limited extent, this expansion of protected-forests has been inadequate to safeguard biodiversity and ecological…”
More strictly protected areas are not necessarily more protective: evidence from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand (2013, background): “For example Joppa and Pfaff (2009), show that the stricter the management category of tropical forest protected areas, the more likely the area is found on ‘higher and steeper lands further away from roads and urban centers’.”
Evaluation of biodiversity policy instruments: what works and what doesn't? (2012, background): “There are two global PA impact studies (Joppa and Pfaff (2010) and Nelson Evaluation of biodiversity policy instruments 79”
Forests, Livelihoods, and Conservation: Broadening the Empirical Base (2014, background): “This is also why natural forests and wildlands often remain especially abundant in inaccessible areas with rugged topography and/or soil limitations, where agricultural conversion has not been worthwhile (Joppa & Pfaff, 2009; Wunder, 2001).”
Conservation priorities for freshwater biodiversity: the key biodiversity area approach refined and tested for continental Africa (2012, background): “Locations of new PAs have been identified either for pragmatic reasons (Margules and Pressey, 2000; Joppa and Pfaff, 2009) or on the basis of our understanding of better known groups, predominantly mammals, birds and amphibians (Brooks et al., 2004; Rodrigues et al., 2004b; Ricketts et al., 2005;…”
Conservation opportunities across the world's anthromes (2014, background): “…ecoregions show a large bias in both the regional and global distribution of protected areas, which are concentrated primarily in areas that are at high elevations, far from human population centres or otherwise unsuitable for agriculture (Pressey, 1994; Wilson et al., 2006; Joppa & Pfaff, 2009).”
A Global Deal For Nature: Guiding principles, milestones, and targets (2019, neutral): “But because biodiversity is unevenly distributed, conservation biologists and planners must be careful to avoid two major risks inherent in a single global percentage: (i) adding more land to reach the global target that is similar to what is already well accounted for at the expense of underreprese”
Large carnivore expansion in Europe is associated with human population density and land cover changes (2021, background): “Furthermore, global analyses have shown that protected areas are typically established in areas previously not impacted by humans (Joppa & Pfaff, 2009; Pressey et al., 1993), which in this context would make them unlikely to contribute to recolonization success.”
Collapse of the world’s largest herbivores (2015, neutral): “This is further exacerbated by the global tendency for protected areas to be in low-quality habitats (35), effectively reducing the densities, and hence numbers, that can be conserved in these areas (36).”
The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection (2014, background): “Coverage varies between 4% and 25% protection of 14 major terrestrial biomes (96).”