TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out (Jeffrey Sayer)
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Locating and designing an ecologically representative network of forest protected areas Towards a Framework for Implementing a Representative System of Forest Protected Areas (Bob Pressey)
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The National Protected Area System Plan in Madagascar (Martin Nicoll, Rasolofo Louis Andriamahaly, Brigitte Carr-Dirick)
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Economic Design Principles for Forest Protected Areas (Amar Inamdar)
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Ecological aspects of design WWF-Canada's Endangered Spaces Campaign (Arlin Hackman)
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Protected Area System Planning in Lao PDR (Klaus Berkmuller)
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Integrating forest protected areas within national development strategies Integrating Forest Protected Areas within National Development Strategies (Thomas McShane and Gonzalo Oviedo)
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Is it Always Right to Kill the Goose? Or IUCN Categories V and VI versus community based resource management (Antoine Leclerc and Baptiste Noël Randrianandianina)
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The Tropical Forestry Action Programme - lessons from Ethiopia and Zambia (Ermias Bekele)
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Balancing Wildlife Conservation with Local Use when Designing Protected Area Systems in Tropical Forests (Elizabeth Bennett)
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People and Totally Protected Areas in Sarawak (Oswald Braken Tisen and Elizabeth Bennett)
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Economic sustainability of forest protected areas ANGAP’s Approach to a Sustainable Future (Antoine Leclerc and Tiana Razafimahatratra)
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Real World Conservation: Combining Biological, Economic and Social Criteria in Planning a National System of Forest Nature Reserves for Uganda (Peter Howard)
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Nature Tourism and Protected Area Pricing: Lessons learned from Africa (Wolf Krug)
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Parastatal Governance of State Protected Areas in Africa and the Caribbean (Alexander James, Sam Kanyamibwa and Michael Green)
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Assessing management effectiveness of forest protected areas Caring for the Assets – the Effectiveness of Protected Areas Management (Adrian Phillips)
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The WCPA Management Effectiveness Framework – Where to from here? (Marc Hockings, Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton)
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Meeting global information and reporting needs Managing and Applying Information on Protected Area Management Effectiveness at Global and Regional Levels: The Role of WCMC and WCPA (Jeremy Harrison and Marc Hockings)
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Page Maintaining the Integrity of Natural World Heritage Sites (Bing Lucas)
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Site Conservation Planning - A Framework for Developing and Measuring the Impact of Effective Biodiversity Conservation Strategies (Jeffrey Parrish)
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The Use of Certification of Sustainable Management Systems and their Possible Application to Protected Area Management (Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley)
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Institutional and utilization issues for assessment systems Institutionalizing Assessments within Protected Area Management Regimes (Robbie Robinson)
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Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Areas (Jamie Ervin)
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Management Effectiveness and Institutional Credibility – Assessment of Management Effectiveness of Protected Areas in Finland (Stig Johansson)
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NGOs and PA Management Agencies Working Together to Assess Protected Area Effectiveness; Successes, Problems and Prospects - the Experience of WWF-Brazil (Rosa Lemos de Sá, Nurit Bensusan, Leandro Ferreira)
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Evaluate, Change and Propagate – Three Steps to Better Parks (Fiona Leverington and Terry Harper)
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Park Effectiveness in The Tropics (Aaron Bruner, Richard Rice, Ted Gullison and Gustavo Fonseca)
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Assessing management effectiveness of protected areas at the site level Implementation of a Framework to Monitor the Management of Protected Areas in Central America (José Courrau)
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Management Effectiveness of the Dja Reserve, Cameroon (Elie Hakizumwami)
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Outcomes-based Evaluation of Management for Protected Areas – a Methodology for Incorporating Evaluation into Management Plans (Glenys Jones)
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PAN Parks – Well-managed Protected Areas Ideal for Sustainable Tourism (Harri Karjalainen)
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Foreword
Human impact is so considerable, and there are so many links between the biosphere and the atmosphere – in both directions – that it is clear that the only course is to manage them jointly. The role of forests is large in that equation, not just in terms of the global carbon cycle, but also in terms of biological diversity. They also play critical roles in ecosystem services such as watershed management, erosion and flood control as well as disaster prevention. So the Forest Protected Areas Initiative represents a global conservation priority of the highest order. A key element in the initiative is the goal of protection of at least 10% of the world’s forest types. Ambitious as this may sound, it is also insufficient. Species-area curves tell us that in the end 10% would conserve only 50% of the species in the forests. In addition, if there is no other forest other than that in protected areas, it would be impossible to ward off the demands for the many products and services forests provide. So the art of the exercise will rest on managing entire forested landscapes in ways which engage the local communities and provide basic human needs while at the same time providing a haven for forest biological diversity. It also means improving management of existing parks where the presence of government is thin to nonexistent. At the same time it is important not to concentrate on improved management at the expense of creating important new protected areas. Opportunities to do the latter are rare, fleeting and may never come again. So it is important to think boldly, although not to the point of foolishness. Based squarely on past experience of what works and what does not, this initiative comes just in the nick of time. In contrast, the benefits will last for countless generations.
Thomas E. Lovejoy
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Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out Jeffrey Sayer
Abstract Extensive areas of forest in the tropics have been legally classified as protected areas; however, in many cases it has been difficult to achieve their conservation. This paper argues that the priority for forest conservation should not be to maximize the area totally protected but rather to focus on improved management effectiveness. The keys to improved management will be greater clarity in defining objectives and a greater commitment to finding locally appropriate conservation approaches. This in turn will suggest that a portfolio of different approaches to forest protection will have a higher chance of success than maximizing the area allocated to arbitrary international frameworks. Practical realities will dictate that the portfolio will include a range of options from elite sites given exemplary protection through to well-managed multipleuse areas where protection and use are balanced. I will argue that in tropical countries with large populations of poor people multiple-use areas will have an especially valuable role to play. An “ecosystem approach” to the management of these areas is proposed and practical ways to develop this approach are suggested. An ecosystem approach will require that conservation agencies move away from “command and control” management and adopt output-based systems based on effective collaboration between all stakeholders.
Jeffrey Sayer Director General Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Bogor INDONESIA Tel: +62 251 622 622 Fax: +62 251 622 100 email:
[email protected]
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Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out Jeffrey Sayer
INTRODUCTION This paper will focus on the problems of conserving natural areas in the less developed countries of the tropics. It will deal particularly with the problems of conserving forests. This is partly because forests are by far the dominant terrestrial ecosystems in these countries, but also because these are the systems whose conservation has attracted most international attention. The conservation community repeatedly claims that more money is needed for forest conservation. The contention of this paper is that it is equally important to make better use of those resources that are already available. After several decades of international action to conserve wild nature in tropical developing countries we are still losing ground. The Global Environment Facility and several major development assistance agencies have channelled billions of dollars towards conservation, yet even the sites that have been the targets of this expenditure often remain in danger (for instance see Wells et al. 1999). I will argue that there are major weaknesses in the conceptual underpinnings of many international conservation programmes. In particular the following generic problems: •
• •
•
• •
Attention has focused on establishing global targets for conservation, for instance to conserve 10 per cent of all forests, but clarity in defining the objectives of these areas is often lacking. Rigorously defined measures of the desired outcomes of conservation programmes are surprisingly rare (Wells et al. 1999). Little is invested in learning from the experiences of our attempts to achieve conservation action on the ground. The sort of information that would be of practical value to the field manager is difficult to access. Attempts to define global conservation programmes are often insensitive to local interests and costs. We espouse the principles of local involvement and participation, but we often make unfounded assumptions about where the interests of local people really lie. Investments have been made in building capacity for sophisticated, “big-picture” conservation professionals. Little has been done to develop capacity for practical conservation action on the ground. There is a lack of practical conservation field practitioners. Conservation needs its equivalent to the “bare-foot doctors” who have helped address health problems in the developing world. Attention has focused on a few simple models for conservation management – the North American National Park model – and not enough in a diversity approach adapted to local political, social, economic and biophysical conditions. We make unwarranted assumptions about what will work in practice. In particular, we try to transport solutions that have worked in a certain economic or political setting to totally different conditions. We ignore the realities of processes of social learning.
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GLOBALLY SIGNIFICANT SITES AND THE WORLD HERITAGE CONVENTION We still need global monitoring, internationally accepted standards for managing priority sites, conferences to share our experience, and knowledge and targets to which all countries can subscribe. Indeed CIFOR et al. (1999) and Sayer et al. (in press) have argued for greatly increased international attention to be given to the elite set of forest sites listed under the World Heritage Convention. They argue that this list should be expanded and that significant international resources be mobilized to ensure the integrity of the sites. If this could be achieved then a major proportion of the world’s forest biodiversity would be protected. However these authors also argue that few of these elite conservation sites are pristine forests, undisturbed by humans. In most cases the biodiversity has evolved in the presence of humans for millennia. The objective of conservation should not, therefore, be to exclude people, but to conserve examples of harmonious and sustainable human-forest relations. Zuidema et al. (1997) and Sayer et al. (in press) also argue that caution should be exercised in adding too many sites to protected area systems. There will be diminishing returns if conservation investments are spread over too many sites, especially if many of these sites are viewed as being of less than exemplary value. In this paper I will further develop the hypothesis that the ideal portfolio of conservation areas will consist of a small number of truly outstanding sites – the cornerstones of the system – the World Heritage sites and other national level exemplary areas. But these must be supported by a much larger network of smaller, more highly targeted nature reserves and much larger areas of locally adapted, multiple-use forests. These second order sites will require different types of management institutions and a different culture of “management”. Buffer zone and Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) have broken some of the ground in helping us to understand how locally relevant, multiple-use sites might be operated. One fundamental need for such conservation programmes will be the capacity to make decisions, adapt objectives to meet local realities, interact meaningfully with local stakeholders, and design and achieve locally adapted solutions. They will require the empowerment of local managers within a framework of national-level regulations to ensure equity and the maintenance of non-local benefits. HOW MANY PROTECTED AREAS DO WE NEED? Other things being equal it would be best for biodiversity conservation to maximize the number and extent of pristine, totally protected areas. Unfortunately all other things are not equal. The number and extent of protected areas that is feasible and desirable will differ between a poor country with a large population and little remaining natural habitat and a richer country with fewer people and large remaining natural areas. The extent to which protected areas incur costs for local people has been widely under-estimated. In reality many of the benefits of strict protection accrue to the global community whilst the costs are met by local people. When these local people are already poor the injustice of the situation becomes apparent. Many acute and intransigent conservation problems occur in areas where large populations of poor people are putting pressure on declining areas of forests and other natural systems. Unfortunately global patterns of population growth and resource use suggest that these situations are likely to become more widespread in the future. This
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suggests that we have to be far more pragmatic in our attitude to conservation in these situations. We cannot conserve everything and we have to make choices. Surely it makes sense for a major criterion in making these choices to be the maintenance of future options. And surely the best way of achieving this is to protect the broadest range of components of the natural systems. Perhaps the vast pristine national parks located in remote frontier areas of developing countries should receive less attention in our conservation programmes. More attention should be given to strategically located, smaller, highly targeted nature reserves spread more broadly throughout the landscape and including a relatively high density of small sites in the more densely populated areas (Zuidema et al. 1997, Corbet and Turner 1996). Many of these sites will inevitably be highly modified by human activity. This does not diminish their value for conservation but it may indicate that the intensity of conservation management will need to be high. The viability of small, modified nature reserves will be highly dependent on the nature of surrounding land uses. Conservation programmes in these situations will require a good understanding of linkages and interactions at the landscape level. Conservation programmes for Java, Vietnam, Thailand, large parts of China, coastal West Africa, and the Andean mountains, should probably have more in common with the carefully managed nature reserves of the United Kingdom or the multiple use “parcs naturels” of France than with the vast wilderness parks of the western USA. If one accepts the hypothesis that for much of the tropical developing world it will be difficult to defend large pristine wilderness areas, then it is axiomatic that much conservation will have to be achieved in various sorts of multiple-use managed natural systems. Trees on farmlands, riparian woodland strips, forests where timber harvesting is subject to restrictions to favour biodiversity etc, will all be important instruments for conservation. Conservation programmes on this model will require quite different institutions and management capacity to the para-military command and control cultures of traditional conservation agencies. They will require a greater degree of devolution of decision making than has been common in the past. Local conservation programmes will have to be tailored to local needs and negotiated with local stakeholders. Conservation professionals will have to have the independence to make agreements with local people and the judgement to decide upon the trade-offs between local needs and national-level conservation objectives. Success must be defined in terms of quality of management rather than on the basis of the extent of the area legally protected. MULTIPLE-USE INTEGRATED PROTECTED AREAS OR STRICTLY PROTECTED SEGREGATED SYSTEMS Most conservation investments in developing countries focus on strictly protected areas in IUCN’s categories l, ll and lll (strict nature reserves, national parks etc.). In industrialized countries we give far more attention to achieving conservation objectives as a secondary objective in a broad range of land-use situations. Thus most of the forest biodiversity of Europe is conserved in forests that are managed for timber and recreation. There is probably no single correct answer to the question of where the balance of these approaches should lie. Temperate and boreal forest systems have been subject to greater climatic perturbations in recent millennia than forests in the tropics. Their biodiversity may therefore have a greater inherent ability to tolerate disturbance than some tropical forests. But the biological specificity of tropical
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forests may have been exaggerated in the conservation literature. Some recent research suggests that the managed landscape mosaics, typical of protected areas in some European countries, would be a good model for the tropics. A more important determinant of the best approach may be the strength of conservation institutions and of civil society in general, rather than the ecology of the forests themselves. The literature has been dominated by debates about whether “sustainable forest management” or “strict protection” is the best approach for tropical forests. In countries with weak legal systems, poorly developed land ownership regimes, large populations of poor landless people and a high level of corruption, it will be difficult to make either approach to conservation work in the short term. In these situations, the conservation portfolio should probably be heavily biased towards damage limitation at the most important locations, accompanied by heavy investments in the development of a local conservation constituency. The proposed set of Social Criteria and Indicators (C&I) for Protected Areas in Table 1 (CIFOR, 1999) may be more valuable measures of progress than the biophysical measures that are more commonly used. Table 1. Proposed Social C&I for Protected Areas P.1.
PROTECTED AREA MANAGEMENT MAINTAINS OR ENHANCES FAIR INTERGENERATIONAL ACCESS TO RESOURCES AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS
C.1.1
Local management is effective in controlling maintenance of, and access to, the protected area resources
C.1.2
Forest actors have a reasonable share in the economic benefits derived from protected area use and management
C.1.3
People link their and their children’s future with good management of local resources
P.2.
CONCERNED STAKEHOLDERS HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED RIGHTS AND MEANS TO MANAGE PROTECTED AREAS COOPERATIVELY AND EQUITABLY
C.2.1
Effective mechanisms exist for two-way communication related to protected area management among stakeholders
C.2.2
Local stakeholders have detailed, reciprocal knowledge pertaining to local resource use (including user groups and gender roles), as well as protected area management plans prior to implementation
C.2.3
Agreement exists on rights and responsibilities of relevant stakeholders
P.3.
THE HEALTH OF THE LOCAL PEOPLE, CULTURES AND THE PROTECTED AREA ARE ACCEPTABLE TO ALL STAKEHOLDERS
C.3.1
There is a recognizable balance between human activities and environmental conditions
C.3.2
The relationship between forest management and human health is recognized
C.3.3
The relationship between forest maintenance and human culture is acknowledged as important
Adapted and excerpted from CIFOR Generic Template, 1999.
INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGMENTS FOR MULTIPLE-USE LANDSCAPES Conservation programmes dependent on a complex array of local interactions and negotiations will clearly require different governance structures and staffing skills than those focused on the protection of a small number of large sites. Local management of complex conservation programmes will require a higher intensity of
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interactions with local governments and resource users and less use of central government fiat to impose regulations. The complex and somewhat bureaucratic structures for managing the “national parks” of France and England may be even more difficult to establish in poorer tropical countries than simpler, centralized “Parks Departments”. We still have a lot to learn about the implications of devolved and decentralized governance structures for resource management in poorer countries. Current work by CIFOR to develop tools for adaptive-collaborative management (ACM) of forests should contribute to this. Much can be learned from projects to develop community management of resources. Joint Forest Management in India, some of the more innovative Integrated Conservation and Development Programs (ICDPs), for instance the Leuser Project in Indonesia and longer standing programmes such as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania can teach us many lessons. Perhaps some of the most striking conclusions to be drawn from experience in this area are: • • •
Central governments cannot abdicate all authority, if they do then conservation attributes of national or global importance will be lost. If large numbers of local stakeholders are going to be empowered to manage resources then the credibility, authority, transparency and professionalism of “intermediate organizations” acquires great importance. Long-term success will almost always require financial incentives or compensation for those local stakeholders who forego resource use in the interests of resource conservation.
A set of more general principles, developed by Elinor Ostrom from the University of Indiana for the management of common property resources, may have broad application for the management of complex landscape mosaics, even if none of the areas concerned are strictly under “common property” regimes. • • • • • • • • • • •
There are clearly defined boundaries: both of the resource and who may appropriate it. Appropriation and provision rules are tailored to local conditions. The resource users who must abide by appropriation rules have a role in making them. Monitors are accountable to, or are, the appropriators. Sanctions for non-compliance are enforceable, and graduated by severity of offence. Low-cost, local mechanisms are available for conflict resolution. Government recognizes the local right to organize institutions. Resource producers, managers and beneficiaries are the same people. Resource management functions are devolved to the lowest level of social organization at which they can be performed properly. Marketing and resource sales are open and competitive. Management represents cooperation between local people, the private sector, and government, with government retaining ultimate authority over natural resources.
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There are many parallels between this set of principles and the so-called “Malawi principles” on “Ecosystem Approaches to Management” at present under discussion in the context of the work of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The Malawi Principles for Ecosystem Management for the Convention on Biological Diversity • • • •
• • • • • • •
Management objectives are a matter of societal choice. Management should be decentralized to the lowest appropriate level. Ecosystem managers should consider the effects (actual or potential) of their activities on adjacent and other ecosystems. Recognizing potential gains from management there is a need to understand the ecosystem in an economic context. Any ecosystem management programme should: - Reduce those market distortions that adversely affect biological diversity - Align incentives to promote sustainable use - Internalize costs and benefits in the given ecosystem to the extent feasible. A key feature of the ecosystem approach includes conservation of ecosystem structure and functioning. Ecosystems must be managed within limits set by their ecological functions. Management should be undertaken at the appropriate scale. Management must recognize the varying temporal scales and lag effects which characterize ecosystems. Processes and objectives for ecosystem management should be set for the long term. Management must recognize that change is inevitable. The ecosystem approach should seek the appropriate balance between conservation and use of biological diversity.
The conclusion that I draw from this is that we should be cautious in attempting to impose uniform institutional models for the management of conservation programmes in complex landscapes. Instead we should draw upon the understanding and rationale incorporated in both the Ostrom and Malawi Principles in designing programmes. Information Systems for Better Management Collecting basic information on the resources that are the object of conservation is an important and necessary precursor to good management. However the collection of information does not in itself contribute to achieving conservation. Inventories and surveys can be very time consuming and expensive. They can require the protracted presence of highly skilled and highly paid experts. They can also make heavy demands upon the time of local field staff. There are examples of biological inventories, surveys, management planning exercises, monitoring and evaluation programmes etc. that greatly exceed in their sophistication and resource demands the real information needs for practical day to day management (Sheil, in prep). This imbalance is a reflection of the fact that the people who plan conservation projects are responding to a different constituency from the day to day managers of the sites. One finds situations where scientists continue with exhaustive studies of obscure wildlife,
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whilst information that a significant part of the area has been cleared for agriculture does not find its way into the hands of managers. Good information is essential for conservation management. But it is important that information needs are defined by managers (and other stakeholders) and that information is immediately accessible to, and understandable by, managers. The relationship between scientists and managers in protected areas systems should reflect the emerging relationships between scientists and managers in any knowledge dependent enterprise. In successful businesses, the divide between science and management is lessening. All management is a form of action research. All managers and other stakeholders are therefore participants in the research. Local and indigenous knowledge may be amongst the most valuable for managers, both formal managers working for conservation agencies and the local people who actually manage resources. Protected area programmes have to go much further in using participatory techniques in their knowledge management systems. Local people can conduct biodiversity surveys and their assessment of the value of different components of biodiversity may have much more value for practical management than lists of species compiled by taxonomists in a distant museum. Information needs for protected areas have to be negotiated and defined collectively by managers, resource users, scientists, and conservation programme sponsors. The information has to flow back to all these stakeholders in easily used forms. Key information will be that which is required to trigger management responses. Criteria and indicators can be the basis for negotiating resource use and are vital tools for adaptive management. They must be developed in a way that allows them to fulfil this need (Colfer in prep). The principles underlying recent work on Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management by CIFOR could have wide application for protected areas. The essential point is that the desired outcomes of management have to be negotiated with all stakeholders. These outcomes have to be expressed in ways that allow for monitoring – the indicators. The indicators are then the signal that allows management to adapt to changing circumstances. The Role of International Organizations The major theme of this paper has been that there is a need to strengthen local capacity to manage conservation programmes. A significant conclusion is that centralized decision making and the desire for uniform “one size fits all” solutions to local conservation issues has created some of the problems that this paper describes. I would like to conclude therefore with a set of proposed guidelines that international conservation organizations and funding agencies might observe. If they do so they should build capacity for diverse, locally adapted, flexible and equitable responses to the broad range of conservation problems which face us. • • • •
Apply the principles for Ecosystem Approaches and, where appropriate common property management as described in this paper. Make long-term commitments to large geographic areas and work at speeds that allow local participatory processes to take their course. Ensure that the fundamental causes of problems are being addressed and not just the symptoms. Invest in people. Committed and competent people are the scarcest and most valuable resource in achieving conservation. Expectations for good performance 183
• •
•
•
•
must be clear and rewards systems must favour those who achieve desired outcomes. Opportunities for continuing professional development must be provided. Work through intermediary institutions and strengthen these institutions. Establish performance indicators for the institutions and link support and rewards to meeting these performance goals. Minimize requirements for information and reports. Define needs for information useful for practical management and monitoring in advance. Restrict information needs to those that are necessary for management. (The procedures of many donors now favour good reporter-writers rather than good conservationpractitioners). Avoid trying to make local programmes conform to global frameworks and classifications. Rather use global systems to aggregate information from diverse local conditions. (Thus a local programme should not be changed to make a site conform to an IUCN Protected Area Category, the categories should be sufficiently broadly defined to allow every locally developed conservation approach to find its place in the classification). Recognize that local people will have different preferred outcomes from those of an international conservation organization and ensure that negotiations are fair and that all assumptions about values are justified and transparent. Be realistic about the role of compensation payments. Ensure that new funding opportunities, for instance the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, are used in ways that support local solutions and are not usurped by special interest groups in ways that diminish the likelihood of local solutions prevailing.
Conclusions All good managers are attentive to their customers and to the environment that surrounds them. Protected area managers can learn much from the general management literature. They must learn to be pragmatic and realistic in dealing with competing pressures on land. Good managers listen, negotiate and adapt their approaches to minimize conflicts. They seek to reduce costs and to invest their resources in the areas where the pay-offs will be highest. Too many protected area managers are still fighting rear-guard actions, trying to impose solutions that will never be supported by those local stakeholders whose influence is crucial.
References CIFOR, UNESCO, Government of Indonesia, 1999. World Heritage Forests: The World Heritage Convention as a mechanism for conserving tropical forest biodiversity. CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia, pp 1-54. CIFOR, 1999. Criteria and Indicators Toolbox Series. CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia. Corbet, R.T. and I.M. Turner, 1996. Long term survival in tropical forest remnants in Singapore and Hongkong. In W.F. Lawrence and R.O. Bierregaard (eds) Tropical Forest Remnants: Ecology, Management and Conservation of Fragmented Communities, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 184
Pierce Colfer, C.J. in press. Towards Social Criteria and indicators for protected areas: One cut on Adaptive Management. In Buck. L.E., Geisler, C.G. Schelhas, J.W. Wollenberg, E. (eds.). Biological diversity: Balancing interests through adaptive collaborative management. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida. Sayer, J.A., N. Ishwaran, J. Thorsell and T. Sigaty, in press. Tropical forest biodiversity and the World Heritage Convention. Ambio. Sheil, D. in prep. Information needs for managing conservation areas. Wells, M., S. Guggenheim, A. Khan, Wahjudi Wardojo and P. Jepson. 1999. Investing in Biodiversity. The World Bank, Washington D.C. Zuidema, P.A., J.A. Sayer and W. Dijkman, 1997. Forest fragmentation and biodiversity: the case for medium sized protected areas. Environ. Cons. 23, 290-297.
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Towards a Framework for Implementing a Representative System of Forest Protected Areas Bob Pressey
Abstract Systematic conservation planning is an explicit, transparent process that combines clear goals, data on the patterns and processes of biodiversity, and expert judgements about the design and maintenance of conservation areas. This paper reviews recent case studies in systematic planning of forest and non-forest protected areas using a generic framework of seven stages: 1. 2.
3.
4. 5.
6.
7.
Goals. Clear statements about the major aims of the exercise to guide the development of data sets and the selection of new conservation areas. Data. Compilation of existing data sets and, where possible, collection of new data that reflect the goals of the planning exercise (e.g. mapping of forest types, distributions of key species). Targets. Development of operational rules that reflect the broad goals of the exercise. Targets are specific, and preferably quantitative, statements about the design of protected areas and the required representation of particular features. Review of existing conservation areas. Assessments of how well the targets are already achieved, thereby defining the scope of the remaining task. Preliminary selection of additional conservation areas. Identification of new candidate conservation areas, preferably based on explicit options for achieving targets and with choices being resolved according to factors such as cost, condition and competing land uses. Implementation of conservation action on the ground. An often protracted process involving decisions about appropriate protection mechanisms, scheduling of conservation action, and replacement of some candidate areas. Maintenance and monitoring of established conservation areas. Ensuring the persistence of the natural values for which conservation areas were established.
Bob Pressey New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service PO Box 402 Armidale NSW 2350 AUSTRALIA email:
[email protected]
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Towards a Framework for Implementing a Representative System of Forest Protected Areas Bob Pressey
BACKGROUND WWF has initiated its Global Forests Campaign - Forests for Life – which aims to establish a system of protected areas that is representative of the world’s forest types. WWF, with its global coverage and extensive placement of experts in the field, is in a strong position to implement this goal in collaboration with IUCN, other NGOs, the World Bank and numerous governments. One purpose of this preliminary framework for conservation planning is to promote discussion about the best ways forward. The framework will continue to evolve as it incorporates new ideas and experiences. Many of the ideas summarized here come from a WWF workshop on ecological representation at Yverdon, Switzerland, in February 2000. Further ideas were added after a conference – “Beyond the Trees” – organized by WWF in Bangkok, May 2000. There are two other important purposes of the framework presented here. One is to raise awareness at the 2003 World Parks Conference about the importance of ecological representativeness. A second is to assist WWF and other conservation agencies in achieving its goal on the ground by establishing guidelines for: • • • • • • • •
assessing the adequacy of existing data sets and deciding when further data are needed assessing the representativeness of existing protected area networks setting well-justified targets at national and regional levels assisting conservation groups in setting targets at landscape scales lobbying governments and institutions and catalyse partner organizations to meet the targets assisting staff of WWF offices in implementing forest protected areas on the ground, including both location and configuration, with a generic checklist of decisions and considerations regularly monitoring WWF’s progress towards its goal emphasizing the importance of maintenance and monitoring of established protected areas.
While there are numerous publications on the selection and design of protected areas, much of this information is fragmented, either in academic journals not regularly used by managers, or in informal publications with limited circulation. Some of the available information and recommendations are contradictory. Moreover, examples and case studies are often discussed at very different spatial scales, and there are few recommendations for reconciling decisions at global, national and landscape levels. WWF intends to produce clear guidelines, with supporting case studies, for the effective location and design of protected areas.
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This paper outlines the approach being developed by WWF, in conjunction with the IUCN (WCPA) Management Effectiveness Task Force, for moving towards a representative system of forest protected areas. Publications on the planning framework At this stage, three publications on the planning framework are envisaged: (1) a concise, highly visual brochure to establish the rationale for the Global Forests Campaign and the proposed approach for moving toward a representative system of forest protected areas; (2) a thoroughly researched and referenced paper for the primary scientific literature; and (3) a comprehensive but accessible manual aimed at practitioners. The manual will have two parts. The first will be a step-by-step description of the planning framework (below) with case studies. The second part will summarize the supporting theory, concepts, and principles, serving as a reference document. The manual is intended to be highly visual, with clearly illustrated examples of the concepts, principles and techniques of locating and designing protected areas. The target audiences will be the WWF Forest Advisory Group, those involved in planning and implementing landscape-level forest conservation projects, and conservation groups involved in lobbying. Draft outline of the scientific paper and the manual Both these publications will have similar structures, although their contents will differ according to target audiences and the need for the scientific paper to be a more concise summary of ideas and information. INTRODUCTION Scene-setting topics include: • • • • •
the loss of biodiversity worldwide, and the moral imperative to protect it summary of history and rates of forest loss protected areas as only one aspect of conservation; the need to manage the surrounding matrix; the need for restoration the position of the planning framework, emphasizing biodiversity conservation, as part of a broader approach that incorporates socio-economic considerations the importance of including people in the planning process if they are potentially affected by planning decisions.
Definitions WWF has so far adopted the definition of forests by FAO and the definition of protected areas by IUCN, ranging across categories I to VI. These definitions come with some limitations. For example, remnant trees and associated understory plants can be seen as “forests” waiting to recover, and plantations may not represent “forests” any more than fields of corn. The persistent problem of ambiguous interpretation of IUCN categories means that different countries, even within the same region, define protected areas very differently. Denmark, for example, claims to have
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100% of their forests protected, while Switzerland claims only 3%. Additional work will be needed to clarify and qualify definitions. Scale - the continuum of scales from global-ecoregion-landscape-site; - define scales and implications for conservation planning; A LANDSCAPE LEVEL APPROACH TO CONSERVATION PLANNING Outline the landscape approach: • • • • • • • • •
provide a workable definition for “landscape” define a landscape approach to conservation planning describe possible criteria for identifying landscapes for conservation planning, including cultural influences discuss the need to “scale up” from landscapes by looking at large processes and issues, and to “scale down” to look at site level issues describe how the landscape approach fits with other approaches (e.g. ecoregional planning) a landscape approach enables an intelligent discussion about broad policy issues and prescriptions, such as certification of plantations, logging in old-growth forests, and managed forests in extinction-prone zones a landscape approach avoids problems inherent in both bottom-up and top-down approaches a landscape is the scale that matters to most human communities the best way to delineate a landscape will vary from region to region, and the boundaries are likely to be blurred and overlapping; the publications will try to develop principles of protected area design at a landscape level, regardless of how landscapes are defined precisely.
WHAT IS SYSTEMATIC CONSERVATION PLANNING? A basic role of protected areas is to separate elements of biodiversity (e.g. species, forest types) from processes that threaten their existence in the wild. The extent to which protected areas succeed in doing this depends on how well they meet two objectives. The first is representativeness, referring to the need for protected areas to represent, or sample, the full variety of biodiversity in a region or country. The second is persistence - protected areas, once established, should promote the long-term survival of the species and other elements of biodiversity they contain by maintaining natural processes and viable populations and excluding threats. To meet these objectives, conservation planning must deal not only with the location of reserves in relation to natural physical and biological patterns, but also with reserve design, which includes variables such as size, connectivity, replication, and alignment of boundaries, for example, with watersheds. A structured, systematic approach to conservation planning provides a firm foundation for achieving these objectives. Systematic conservation planning has several distinctive characteristics (Table 1). First and fundamentally, it is based on clear statements about the broad, idealized goals of the planning exercise. Second, it requires clear choices about the features to be used as surrogates for overall biodiversity in the planning process. Third, it is 189
guided by explicit, and preferably quantitative, operational targets that are designed to implement the broad goals. Fourth, it recognizes the extent to which conservation targets have been met in existing reserves. Fifth, it employs simple, explicit methods for locating and designing new reserves to complement existing ones in achieving targets. Sixth, it applies explicit criteria for implementing conservation action on the ground, especially with respect to the scheduling of protective management when not all candidate areas can be secured at once (usually). Seventh and finally, it adopts explicit objectives and mechanisms for maintaining the conditions within reserves required to foster the persistence of key natural features, together with monitoring of those features and adaptive management as required. The effectiveness of systematic conservation planning comes from its efficiency in using limited resources to achieve conservation goals, its defensibility and flexibility in the face of competing land uses, and its accountability in allowing decisions to be critically reviewed. This is an idealized description of a process that is difficult to achieve in practice. Nevertheless, substantial parts have now been implemented around the world. WHY IS SYSTEMATIC CONSERVATION PLANNING NECESSARY? The case for systematic conservation planning can perhaps be made most cogently by considering the implications of conservation decisions that are not systematic. Protected areas have often been located in places that do not contribute to the representation of biodiversity. The main reason is that reservation usually stops or slows the extraction of natural resources. In some regions, housing and commercial development compete with land reserves. The economic and political implications can be serious and reserves can be degraded or even formally de-gazetted when they prove to be economically valuable. As a result, reserves tend to be concentrated on land that, at least at the time of establishment, was too remote or unproductive to be important economically. This means that many species occurring in productive landscapes or those with development potential are not protected, even though disturbance, transformation to intensive uses, and fragmentation continue. Another reason for the inappropriate location of reserves is the diversity of reasons for which reserves are established. A diversity of goals means that different proponents see different places as important. Because highly valued areas arising from alternative conservation goals often fail to overlap, there is competition among proponents for limited funds and the limited attention spans of decision makers. Moreover, goals such as the protection of grand scenery and wilderness often focus on areas that are remote, rugged and residual from intensive uses, giving them a political advantage over goals like representativeness which focus also on disturbed, economically productive landscapes. A FRAMEWORK FOR SYSTEMATIC CONSERVATION PLANNING Systematic conservation planning can be seen as a process in seven stages (Table 1), each of which is discussed in detail in the following sections. The process is not unidirectional – there will be many feedbacks and reasons for revised decisions about priority areas. For example, conservation targets will need to be re-examined as
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knowledge accumulates; replacement candidate reserves will have to be identified when unforeseen difficulties arise in implementation. The framework is also highly relevant to many problems in “off-reserve” conservation, including habitat restoration. Decisions about both on and off-reserve conservation, if they are not to be ad hoc and uncoordinated, should be guided by explicit goals, identification of priorities in regional or broader contexts, and clear choices between potential conservation areas and alternative forms of management. The framework is applicable to a range of geographic scales. It could be applied across whole countries or ecoregions or over much smaller areas such as local government areas or other administrative districts. The framework draws on the following three references: Pressey, R.L. (1997). Priority conservation areas: towards an operational definition for regional assessments. In: National Parks and Protected Areas: Selection, Delimitation and Management. Eds. J.J. Pigram and R.C. Sundell. University of New England, Centre for Water Policy Research, Armidale. pp. 337-357. Pressey, R.L. and Logan, V.S. (1997). Inside looking out: findings of research on reserve selection relevant to “off-reserve” nature conservation. In: Conservation Outside Nature Reserves. Eds. P. Hale and D. Lamb. Centre for Conservation Biology, University of Queensland. pp. 407-418. Margules, C.R. and Pressey, R.L. (2000). Systematic conservation planning. Nature 405, 243-253.
Stage 1. Identify broad, idealized conservation goals A planning exercise should begin with clear statements about its overarching, idealized intentions. These could include the retention of the present biodiversity of a region or country or the maintenance of specific environmental services or ecosystem functions. Goals are the ultimate criteria for judging the success of planning. They should reflect a vision of what the region should look like in the future. They should not be constrained (at least not until later in the process) by limitations of data or perceived difficulties in implementation. Basing a conservation plan on idealized goals has three advantages: 1. The goals are not compromised at the outset by real or perceived constraints imposed by socio-economic forces. This preserves a clear picture of the extent to which nature conservation is in conflict with the material and economic aspirations of societies. 2. Goals serve to define the data requirements of the planning process (stage 2), rather than vice versa.
3.
Goals not only help to formulate operational targets for conservation planning (stage 3) but also encourage subsequent reviews of how well these targets reflect the basic goals. Just as the “map is not the landscape”, targets are only an interpretation of the goals, are subject to revision as our knowledge of conservation biology improves, and, in many cases, represent compromises by
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planners between what should be achieved and what is considered feasible within political and economic constraints. Stage 2. Compile and/or collect data A fundamental part of any conservation plan is to compile, collect and manage the data that will guide conservation decisions toward achieving the goals of the exercise. Time and money must usually be allocated to gathering data sets, assessing their limitations, and archiving them with appropriate documentation. Some planning processes minimize this stage by assembling experts for workshops to identify priority conservation areas. This approach has been advocated when biological data are poor and time and money are insufficient for consistent data sets to be compiled. However, the limitations of biological data can often be partly offset by compiling information on biological surrogates such as broad vegetation types (below). With some consistent information on biological surrogates, it is possible to combine the benefits of consistent data analysis with expert judgement (see stage 5). Data on biodiversity These are inevitably surrogates for the whole of biodiversity. Examples are environmental classes, forest types, point localities of well-known or well-collected species, and the distributions of a few large, charismatic animals. Broadscale mapped data on environmental classes or forest types are often available consistently over large areas, sometimes for whole planning regions. The disadvantage of these data is that they serve only as a “coarse filter” – they are biologically heterogeneous and might only roughly approximate the distributions of many of the species in a region. Conserving a piece of each type does not, therefore, ensure the protection of the region’s complement of biodiversity. On the other hand, direct biological data such as localities of species are notoriously biased to roads and other lines of access. Using such locality data implies that planners have decided that the benefits of direct data on species of interest outweigh the disadvantages of spatial bias. A solution to sampling bias is to model the wider spatial distributions of species from point records, but the reliability of models is also at least partly a function of the degree of spatial bias. Data are needed not only for biodiversity pattern (e.g. species, forest types) but also on natural processes. One familiar example of process data would be information on the minimum viable populations of selected species required to ensure long-term persistence. Less familiar examples concern geomorphic and evolutionary processes. Available data can limit the achievement of broad goals Data relevant to some broad goals (e.g. ecological processes, requirements for the persistence of particular species) is likely to be unavailable. Planners and managers must then decide if time and money are available to gather this data. Biodiversity surrogates can be tested for informativeness Recent research is developing statistical techniques for testing how well surrogates such as vegetation types and environmental classes reflect the distributions of species and serve as a framework for conservation planning.
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Broadly mapped biodiversity surrogates can be subdivided Very broadly mapped surrogates, such as extensive forest types, can provide a poor framework for conservation planning because they are heterogeneous in biological composition. It will often be possible to subdivide such broad land types with additional data on terrain, geology, climate, etc. Another approach would be to use experts to subdivide broad forest types according to observed, but previously unmapped, biological discontinuities. Data sets for conservation planning can cover more than one type of biodiversity surrogate Data sets need not be homogeneous. For example, they can contain information on the distribution of forest types, species localities, and modelled distributions of species. Other important data on biodiversity Other important data on biodiversity include: • • • •
the remaining area of each environmental class or forest type; indices of condition, connectivity or fragmentation; status and population trends of indicator or focal species; degree of restriction of features to the planning region (are they more typical of other regions or endemic to this one?).
Data on ecosystem services It might be possible to compile information on ecosystem services such as water supply, water quality, etc. In a few cases, it might be possible to estimate the economic value of these services. Data on planning units It will usually be necessary to compile data on planning units – the pieces of the landscape that are the building blocks of expanded systems of protected areas. Options include grid cells, watersheds, tenure parcels, habitat remnants or a mix of these across the planning region. Data on cultural values Data on threatening processes Information on the rates and patterns of processes that threaten biodiversity is just as critical as data on biodiversity itself. Important types of information include: -
historical land-use patterns current rates and patterns of habitat loss projected future loss of habitat information on processes like grazing, logging, weeds and exotic animals; these can be harder to monitor from remote sources; other difficulties for interpretation
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are that their intensity varies in time and space and their impacts on biodiversity are selective and sometimes poorly understood.
Data on socio-economic values These will often overlap with information on threatening processes (e.g. agricultural potential is an index of threat). Land values or opportunity costs for nature conservation could be useful for planning and to assess the economic implications of a conservation plan. Other contextual data Some other types of data can be important for guiding decisions about priority conservation areas. Examples are tenure, roads and rivers. General considerations for all data sets: -
careful design and costing of new collections effects of scale on use and interpretation uncertainty, quality and limitations on interpretation effectiveness of surrogates data protocols and agreements “seams” between data coverage and how to deal with them managing, documenting and archiving managing sensitive information accessing key sources (e.g. online data on geology and terrain) relative priorities of data layers when time and funds are limited (almost always).
Stage 3. Identify operational targets to guide conservation decisions Targets are the operational guidelines for achieving the broad goals identified in stage 1. The most familiar targets relate to the representation of biodiversity pattern in protected areas (e.g. numbers of occurrences of each rare species, hectares of each vegetation type). More generally, targets can, and should, be framed in several ways: representation (of biodiversity pattern); note that these can take several forms if the data are heterogeneous (e.g. occurrences of species, extent of forest types, area of predicted core habitat) persistence (of biodiversity processes) using surrogates such as size, shape, connectivity, condition, replication; core vs. marginal habitat; refugia and “special” habitats such as breeding and roosting sites identification of desirable population sizes or recovery trends for particular species (e.g. focal species that are most sensitive to landscape change) maintenance of evolutionary processes where these can be related to particular areas or to particular combinations of habitats ecosystem services (e.g. retention of vegetation on groundwater recharge areas or in the headwaters of rivers; retention of estuarine wetlands) defensibility and exclusion of threatening processes from outside the future boundaries of the protected area (alignment with watersheds, absence of adjacent
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agriculture or industry); these can pre-empt problems for maintenance of protected areas after they are established (stage 7).
Some of these targets lend themselves to quantification. Others are more likely to be qualitative or expressed as preferences (e.g. where there is a choice, favour areas with particular characteristics). All targets require determination for the biodiversity and threatening processes of particular regions and will probably vary between parts of regions (e.g. minimum reserve size for large mammals in mountains vs. endemic plants on coastal lowlands). WWF’s stated target for its Global Forests Campaign is “The establishment … of an ecologically representative network of protected areas covering at least 10 per cent of [each of] the world’s forest types … - in line with Recommendation 16 of the IVth World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas Congress”. This is a suitable starting point for a process of refining conservation targets for forests. Framing the 10 per cent target in relation to individual forest types is an improvement over requiring 10 per cent of each biome as in the Caracas recommendations. The WWF target ensures that protection will be spread more evenly within biomes, countries or regions. However, the WWF target, as it stands, involves several problems: 1. It does not specify whether the 10 per cent refers to the extant or estimated original (pre-clearing) area of each forest type. Setting percentage targets in terms of extant areas is counter-productive because the percentage of a type in existing reserves can be enlarged by further clearing of unreserved stands. Percentage targets should therefore be set in relation to the estimated “original” area of each forest type. The resulting number of hectares could represent a much larger percentage of extant area for forest types that have been partly transformed. For some types, the target area will be larger than the extant area. This effectively means that any occurrences are irreplaceable. It also indicates the extent of restoration efforts that will be required. 2. The figure of 10 per cent is essentially arbitrary, as was the same figure applied to biomes in the Caracas recommendations. Realistically, targets representing less than 100 per cent of the extant areas of some forest types will lead to some loss of biodiversity. There are two reasons. Firstly, many (most?) forest types are highly heterogeneous spatially, not only in terms of known species and populations, but probably more in terms of the undescribed species and undocumented variation between populations. Secondly, in many forest types, the processes of species loss will already have been set in train. Because of changes to ecological and evolutionary processes, some extinction will occur even with retention of all remaining stands. 3. A single percentage for all forest types fails to recognize that some forest types need more protection than others. At least two factors are important here. First, larger targets are needed to sample the internal variation of forest types that are more heterogeneous biologically. Second, for some forest types, 10 per cent in protected areas could mean up to 90 per cent lost if they have good potential for intensive land uses. To account for variations in vulnerability, targets should be
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scaled up from some baseline (probably an arbitrary one) according to the natural rarity and vulnerability of each forest type. Both these factors are related also to the scale at which forest types have been mapped. Targets for broad, heterogeneous types (e.g. mapped at 1:250,000) could be achieved while leaving much of their internal variation unprotected. Moreover, there will be political and economic pressures to protect those parts of broad forest types with least potential for extractive uses. 4. Representation targets such as 10 per cent, or even larger percentages, do not specifically address the spatial requirements of ecological and evolutionary processes. Process-related targets are also required. Stage 4. Review the existing system of protected areas against targets Intersecting the boundaries of protected areas with maps of vegetation types or localities of species is a long-established practice. Judging when vegetation types or species are adequately protected is part of some of these exercises and requires explicit statements about conservation targets (stage 3). Reviewing protected areas with maps and GIS is the basis for the Gap Analysis Programme. At its most basic, the logic is simple – natural features that are outside protected areas or are protected at levels below their conservation targets should be the focus of future conservation efforts. This logic can be applied even in regions with poor biological data. In these cases, analysis of gaps can be done with broad surrogates for biodiversity (e.g. vegetation types or environmental classes). Environmental classes are often necessary for regions where biological collecting has been intensive but patchy (e.g. the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa). Although often necessary, analyses based on broad biodiversity surrogates will often overlook rare or threatened species. At least two important aspects of reviewing protected areas have not received the attention they deserve. The first concerns the relative risks faced by vegetation types, species, and other natural features in the “gaps” between protected areas. The second, concerns the assessment of how well natural processes, as opposed to biodiversity pattern, are protected. The upshot of the first point is that some gaps are more important, and should be more urgently filled, than others. Features such as vegetation types and species vary in their vulnerability to threats such as clearing, logging, grazing and mining. For example, in most regions, there will be under-protected features that occur on land with varying potential for agricultural development. Of these, the forest types and species most at risk from transformation need to be highlighted for urgent conservation action (and see stage 6 on implementation). In Sweden, the protected area system is heavily biased toward sub-alpine regions (44% protection by area) with least potential for intensive land use, compared to 0.4% in the South Boreal, 0.7% in the Hemi Boreal, and 0.6% in the Nemoral regions. In order to meet long-term conservation goals, increases in protection of boreal and nemoral forests would need to be increased at least five-fold. Another variation on this theme would be to identify the extent to which “gap” forest types and species occur on private or public land. The feasibility and complexity of conservation actions on these two tenures are often very different.
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The second poorly developed aspect of gap analysis concerns biodiversity processes. Gaps are most commonly identified in relation to one or more aspects of biodiversity pattern (maps of vegetation types or species localities). This is necessary but not sufficient for a realistic assessment of protected areas. Only a few assessments have included data on size, defensibility and other process-related factors. Other relevant considerations include the dynamics of seral stages and connectivity. Notably, there is no generic assessment of process-related factors to serve as a checklist of possible considerations for regional reviews of protected areas. One complication with a generic set of criteria is that species vary widely in their responses to aspects of reserve design. An important part of assessing the adequacy of reserves for maintaining natural processes could therefore be the analysis of “focal” species – organisms chosen because of their particular sensitivity to, say, logging activities or fragmentation of habitat. In these cases, population sizes and trends in distribution and abundance can be monitored relative to target levels in these variables, and the need for additional formal protection of habitat identified. In some cases, factors such as age distribution and breeding success will need to be included. Information on these could reveal long-term problems for persistence, even if the species is apparently still abundant and widespread. Stage 5. Select and design additional conservation areas With conservation targets identified (stage 3) and the existing protected areas reviewed against these targets (stage 4), the scope of the remaining task for conservation planning becomes apparent. In this stage of the process it is necessary to identify the candidate conservation areas that should be added to the existing system. Two alternative approaches to this task can be identified although, in reality, they are not incompatible and should be blended wherever possible. One approach is the expert workshop and the other is to use reserve selection programmes (or “algorithms”) to analyse more-or-less consistent data sets to identify candidate conservation areas. In expert workshops, the data set is the sum of knowledge in the experts’ heads and some structured approach is used by which experience and opinion are combined to identify priority areas for conservation. This source of information is always valuable for conservation planning and the expert-driven approach might seem a pragmatic response to biological data that are patchy and biased and which cannot be substantially improved within the constraints of time and/or funds. However, planning based only on expert judgements always suffers from the inevitable geographic and taxonomic biases of the people involved. This is not an argument for delaying conservation decisions until comprehensive biological data sets have been collected. It is an argument for combining expert judgements with analysis of widely available data sets on biodiversity surrogates (e.g. vegetation types, geology, soils, terrain, climatic variables, native vegetation cover). These data are available for many parts of the world. There are two important implications: 1. Systematic analyses for conservation planning are not made infeasible by poor biological data. It will often be possible to compile a consistent map of biodiversity surrogates such as vegetation types or environmental classes.
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2. The most effective conservation planning comes from analysis of consistent data sets coupled with expert judgements on issues such as the design of protected areas and the locations and requirements of particular species. Reserve selection programmes addressing quantitative conservation targets have been used increasingly since the early 1980s. They are now evolving into decision-support systems which lay out the options for conservation decisions and employ expert judgements to resolve choices. These systems can also be used to develop alternative conservation scenarios for regions and to minimize the conflict between conservation and economic values. Conservation planning that uses design targets (size, connectivity) should ideally be based on maps of options, with final decisions made by experts. Analyses that attempt to automate design decisions are limited as real-world planning tools because they are unable to make context-sensitive decisions (e.g. in which parts of the region is compactness better than replication?). Analytical methods for selected protected areas are also applicable to identifying areas for off-reserve management and for habitat restoration. In the latter case, the conservation targets would be set in terms of areas of presently transformed or degraded potential habitat (defined by environmental variables, knowledge of past occurrences, or remnant populations). Some ground-truthing is always desirable for the candidate conservation areas identified in this stage. Data on biodiversity, past land use, and threats, are always approximate and sometimes wrong. Ground-truthing can increase the confidence with which planners can argue for the importance of areas selected on the basis of remotely derived information. Stage 6. Implement conservation action on the ground Selecting candidate conservation areas “on paper” and implementing conservation action on the ground can be very different processes. Implementation is usually complicated by the variety of people, agencies and commercial interests with a stake in the region and by the time needed to apply conservation management to particular areas. The eventual system of reserves can be very different from the one designed in stage 5. An example of a relatively straightforward case of implementation is the 1996 expansion of forest conservation areas in north-eastern New South Wales, Australia. Planning was restricted to public land and the application of conservation action was rapid once the new areas had been negotiated to meet (most) targets and boundaries had been fine-tuned on the ground. Only a few forms of protection were at issue with little uncertainty about where they should be applied most appropriately. The implemented configuration was little different from that produced in the selection stage. A more complex and probably more widespread situation involves a mix of land tenures, ongoing loss and alteration of indigenous vegetation during a protracted process of applying conservation action on the ground, and the need to decide on an
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appropriate mix of protection measures. Three types of decisions are particularly important. Firstly, the most appropriate or feasible form of management should be identified for each area. This might be complicated by the need to apply particular forms of management in particular designated places, for example in biosphere reserves, which have core and buffer zones. In some cases, the preferred form of management might be infeasible and will need to be changed. Secondly, if one or more selected areas prove to be unexpectedly degraded or difficult to protect, it will be necessary to return to stage 5 and identify replacements, where they exist. Thirdly, decisions are needed on the relative timing of conservation action when resources are insufficient to implement the whole network quickly. With ongoing loss and alteration of habitat, a strategy is needed to minimize the extent to which conservation targets are compromised before being achieved. One strategy for doing this is to identify priorities in terms of spatial and temporal options. Arguably, priority for the allocation of limited conservation resources should go to areas that are both imminently threatened and contain features that, if lost or degraded, will seriously compromise conservation targets. At global and continental scales, this rationale has led to the hotspots approach and to other similar methods for identifying priorities. The same rationale has been applied within regions at the scale of individual protected areas. Some other points on implementation are listed here from the WWF workshop on ecological representation in Yverdon, February 2000: -
-
-
implementation is not so much a series of steps but a dynamic process, constantly adjusting to unexpected problems and opportunities some thought should be given to the period over which implementation is expected to proceed, as well as the implications of the process taking less or more time than expected establishing and maintaining partnerships will be critical constraints on resources should be identified and kept clearly in mind it will be important to also identify existing policies that have a bearing on land use, including perverse incentives to clear land, and undervaluing of natural resources existing mechanisms and policy instruments should be thoroughly explored and understood the importance of lobbying and fundraising should not be under-estimated the importance of education and outreach should not be under-estimated the planning process must balance group dynamics, community participation, and conservation effectiveness local knowledge, supplemented by learning in the planning process, is critical the managers of established conservation areas will need a clear basis for making day-to-day decisions strategies will often need to include private lands (note that IUCN’s definitions also apply equally to public and private ownerships) in areas with high levels of private ownership, tenure can change every 5 to 20 years even in areas of primarily state-owned forests, political changes and economic forces are likely to make truly long-term management unlikely
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-
choosing the correct scale for planning and implementation may be difficult; there is a fine balance between too fine a scale and too coarse there is likely to be political and social resistance to landscape-level conservation, in part because it crosses traditional boundaries there is an urgency to act quickly, even in the face of knowledge gaps.
Stage 7. Maintenance and monitoring of established protected areas Sound management effectively involves another cycle of the previous six stages applied to individual reserves. It requires broad goals of management to be identified (stage 1). It also requires information on the biodiversity of each reserve, knowledge of the processes that underpin ecological functions, and an understanding of the responses of key elements of biodiversity to natural processes and anthropogenic disturbances (stage 2). Management should be based on explicit goals or targets i (as in stage 3), reflecting the broad goals and preferably acknowledging the contribution of each reserve’s particular natural values to the regional system. Based on the extent to which management goals are already being achieved (stage 4), it might be necessary to review prescriptions or zonings and to prepare a new management plan indicating which parts of reserves are appropriate for different uses, require regulation of natural processes, or need to be rehabilitated (stage 5). Problems with implementation of the management plan (stage 6) will usually be minimized or avoided if key interest groups have a say in its development. As with the selection and implementation of new reserves, this process is not fixed and unidirectional. New data on patterns and processes within a reserve might call for revised goals. More generally, ongoing management should be complemented by periodic monitoring (back to stage 4) to assess the effectiveness of management actions in achieving nominated goals, with subsequent adjustment of goals and activities, as appropriate. Interaction between reserve management and the location and design of reserves is inevitable. Decisions in the earlier stages of the planning process should, if possible, anticipate management issues. Key considerations include size and shape, alignment of boundaries with watersheds, avoidance of intrusive adjacent land uses, negotiations with neighbours, and the maintenance of migration routes. In turn, as the management needs of established reserves become apparent, or as new needs emerge, it might be necessary to return to the selection stage of the overall planning process (stage 5) to modify the design of individual reserves or the overall conservation network. All stages. The overarching review process Sitting over this seven-stage planning process are tasks that require periodic attention. One of these is the repetition of the review process in stage 4, not only to gauge progress towards conservation targets but, just as importantly, to review the targets themselves against the broad, idealized goals of the planning exercise. It could be that improving knowledge of species’ requirements and the responses of species and ecological systems to threats would require targets to be altered if they are to truly reflect the major goals. Another periodic review concerns the available data on 200
biodiversity, threatening processes and other issues. As data improve, conservation decisions will need to adjust. Acknowledgements Jamie Ervin played a major role in the workshops at Yverdon and Bangkok that helped to refine the approach outlined here. Jamie also compiled the notes from Yverdon on which some sections of this paper are based.
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Table 1. Seven stages in systematic conservation planning, with some examples of tasks and decisions in each. Note that the process is not unidirectional; there will be many feedbacks and reasons for altering decisions (see text for examples).
1. DEFINE BROAD, IDEALIZED GOALS FOR THE PLANNING PROCESS •
Clearly state the ideals of the planning process, even if some of these appear unrealistic in the context of the constraints on conservation action. These goals become the benchmark against which the success of conservation planning can be judged.
2. COMPILE DATA ON THE PLANNING REGION • • •
•
Review existing data and decide on which data sets are sufficiently consistent to serve as surrogates for biodiversity across the planning region If time allows, collect new data to augment or replace some existing data sets Collect information on the localities of species considered to be rare and/or threatened in the region (these are likely to be missed or under-represented in conservation areas selected only on the basis of land classes such as vegetation types) Compile data on cultural and socio-economic values, rates and patterns of threatening processes.
3. IDENTIFY CONSERVATION TARGETS FOR THE PLANNING REGION •
• •
Set quantitative conservation targets for species, vegetation types or other features (e.g. at least three occurrences of each species, 1,500 hectares of each vegetation type, or specific targets tailored to the conservation needs of individual features). Despite inevitable subjectivity in their formulation, the value of such goals is their explicitness Set quantitative targets for minimum size, connectivity or other design criteria Identify qualitative targets, or preferences (e.g. as far as possible, new conservation areas should have minimal previous disturbance from grazing or logging).
4. REVIEW EXISTING CONSERVATION AREAS • •
Measure the extent to which quantitative targets for representation and design have been achieved by existing conservation areas Identify the imminence of threat to under-represented features such as species or vegetation types, and the threats posed to areas that will be important in securing satisfactory design targets.
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5. SELECT ADDITIONAL CONSERVATION AREAS • •
Regard established conservation areas as “constraints” or focal points for the design of an expanded system Identify preliminary sets of new conservation areas for consideration as additions to established areas. Options for doing this include reserve selection algorithms or decision-support software to allow stakeholders to design expanded systems that achieve regional conservation goals subject to constraints such as existing reserves, acquisition budgets, or limits on feasible opportunity costs for other land uses.
6. IMPLEMENT CONSERVATION ACTIONS • • •
Decide on the most appropriate or feasible form of management to be applied to individual areas (some management approaches will be fallbacks from the preferred option) If one or more selected areas prove to be unexpectedly degraded or difficult to protect, return to stage 4 and look for alternatives Decide on the relative timing of conservation management when resources are insufficient to implement the whole system in the short term (usually).
7. MAINTAIN THE REQUIRED VALUES OF CONSERVATION AREAS •
• •
Set conservation goals at the level of individual conservation areas (e.g. maintain seral habitats for one or more species for which the area is important). Ideally, these goals will acknowledge the particular values of the area in the context of the whole system Implement management actions and zonings in and around each area to achieve the goals Monitor key indicators that will reflect the success of management actions or zonings in achieving goals. Modify management as required.
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The National Protected Area System Plan in Madagascar Martin Nicoll, Rasolofo Louis Andriamahaly1 and Brigitte Carr-Dirick2
Abstract
The Malagasy National Protected Area System Plan has to take into account the country’s striking biological diversity and marked habitat loss and fragmentation within a complex pattern of land ownership and cultural practices. Species composition is best considered as a continuum of change, even over relatively short distances, and existing ecoregional models and discernible distinct habitats are too coarse to decide how many protected areas are needed and where they should be. We thus used available biogeographical information to determine sites rather than distinctive regions for the improved protected area system. The proposed system will have numerous, relatively small protected areas in order to optimize biodiversity representation within remaining natural ecosystems. Association Nationale pour la Gestion des Aires Protégées (ANGAP) was only recently established as the managing authority. The Plan presents an overview of broad operational strategies for conservation, sustainable development, research, education, and ecotourism. This will help to attract donor support in an under-funded environment.
Martin Nicoll Regional Technical Assistant Association Nationale pour la Gestion des Aires Protégées (ANGAP) B.P. 400 Toliara 401 MADAGASCAR
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email:
[email protected] 1
Rasolofo Louis Andriamahaly ANGAP 2
Brigitte Carr-Dirick WWF Madagascar Programme Office
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The National Protected Area System Plan in Madagascar Martin Nicoll, Rasolofo Louis Andriamahaly and Brigitte Carr-Dirick
CONTEXT In Madagascar, the development of a National Protected Area System Plan is part of a broader process involving five key steps: (1) the creation of a legal code for protected areas (Code des Aires Protégées, COAP); (2) the System Plan itself; (3) an organizational review of the protected area management authority; (4) the development of a Business Plan for the entire system, and (5) the establishment of a sustainable financial program. At the time of writing this paper, a draft of the National Protected Area System Plan is currently under review within the protected area management authority - the Association Nationale pour la Gestion des Aires Protégées - ANGAP. We therefore underline that the Plan has not yet been approved. Why a National Protected Area System Management Plan? All national protected area networks need a system plan for several reasons. Firstly, it is an invaluable exercise for protected area planners to analyse biodiversity patterns within their country in order to ensure that natural ecosystems, habitats and species assemblages are well represented in the network. Secondly, it helps to raise questions concerning how best to achieve conservation in varying situations where protected areas may be one of several viable options. Thirdly, a system plan helps to justify the network and its associated conservation activities to decision makers, the public and financial backers – an essential factor if relatively large blocks of national territory are to be closed off to many other forms of usage. Most system plans comprise biological or bioclimatic analyses to justify the maintenance or the creation of protected areas within the national network. The analysis usually determines ecoregions or bioclimatic regions so that each may be represented by at least one park or reserve. In the case of Madagascar, ANGAP decided that this would not satisfy the second and third value points noted above. Malagasy protected areas are publicly and continuously debated. On the one hand there is tremendous immediate political pressure to focus on poverty relief and economic development, with the utilization of natural resources being a major element. The flip-side of the coin is based on the country’s status as a megadiversity/hotspot (Mittermeier et al., 1997; Mittermeier et al., 1999), encouraging many aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to commit more than US$150 million for conservation and sustainable resource use, with a significant proportion going to protected area creation and management. While partisans of both camps periodically take a rather one-sided position in the public debate, there appears to be a growing acceptance that conservation of natural resources – including setting aside protected areas – is a fully integral part of sustainable development within the context of Madagascar’s challenging economic environment. We present the approaches adopted by ANGAP to develop a National Protected Area System Management Plan in part to document how the Plan was adapted to the specific context of Madagascar. The second reason is to document the approach that
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we took so that protected area managers in other countries, where conditions are similar, may decide whether their system plans may benefit from all or some of the approaches used in Madagascar. The Malagasy Plan is essentially divided into three complementary sections: representation of biodiversity and ecological processes; management strategies for the protected area system; and management operationalization. Following a brief overview of why the Plan is so structured and how it was developed, we will describe the three elements in more detail. Historical context for protected areas The first protected area was created in 1927, and the ministry responsible for forest and wetland management was charged with its management. The number steadily increased until by the 1990s more than 40 parks and reserves existed, designated as either Strict Nature Reserves (World Conservation Union, IUCN Category I), National Parks (IUCN Category II) or Special Reserves (IUCN Category IV) (IUCN/UNEP/WWF, 1987; Nicoll & Langrand, 1989). Growing awareness of Madagascar’s remarkable biodiversity and the high rate of loss of natural habitats led to the development in 1990 of the National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP), which is divided into three phases. Phase I (1990 - 1997) involved the strengthening of existing environmental ministries and the creation of some new institutions. ANGAP was specifically created in 1992 to manage all protected areas where biodiversity conservation is the main goal. Protected areas were at that time either effectively without staff or had only a bare minimum with few resources. Up to 1997 ANGAP’s principal role was to coordinate the progressive development of effective park management, largely – but not entirely – through integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) managed by third party organizations such as NGOs. The current Phase II of the NEAP involves increasing the direct responsibility for protected area management by ANGAP, and aims to reinforce management capacity within ANGAP. Phase III focuses mainly on ensuring financial sustainability of the protected area system and a fully competent ANGAP. STRUCTURING AND DEVELOPING THE PLAN The paper’s authors were given the task of structuring and collating the Plan under a small steering committee within ANGAP. The Plan’s draft structure and its development process were agreed upon by the Association’s Management Committee in April 1999. The Committee, comprising Head Office and all regional directors, decided that the Plan should embrace the management strategies and overall priorities for the entire protected area system. The decision was based primarily on the perception that ANGAP, as a relatively recently created body with little accumulated experience in protected area management, required the management strategies and overall system prioritization for its own internal development. These two elements were thus added in order to establish a clear rationale for the entire protected area system and provide a basic profile for each individual park and reserve. This was considered possible because it was decided from the start that the Plan would be generated from a broad consensus among all senior ANGAP management including the Head Office, Regional Offices and individual protected areas, together with representatives from partner organizations who knew the issues well. The value of such a broad ranging Plan in garnering political and aid agency support was also
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quickly recognized: the Plan became a major point of interest within the conservation community even before a draft version was developed. It led to requests for information on ANGAP priorities and strategies from numerous partners, together with offers of unsolicited additional conservation information on a range of potential future protected areas that was hitherto little known. The Plan took on such interest that ANGAP was given permission to modify its normally binding proposed annual work plans and budget allocations for the year 2000, once the System Management Plan was approved at a later date. This decision was taken during the annual meeting between the Malagasy Government, NEAP agencies and aid agencies in November 1999, just as the Plan’s first draft was being developed. Step 1: Analysis of ecoregions and priority conservation areas The first step in developing the Plan was a two-day scientific workshop held in the capital, Antananarivo, in July 1999. More than 30 participants from the scientific community, conservation specialists, and senior ANGAP staff from all over the country were given the task of defining ecoregions and identifying individual sites as the basis for the future protected area system. The workshop involved a review of existing ecoregion models (Cornet, 1974; Du Puy & Moat, 1996; Faramalala, 1988, 1995; Faramalala & Conservation International, 1995; Humbert, 1965, Humbert & Cours Darne, 1965) and available biodiversity information collected from national, regional and site surveys. The review was greatly facilitated by the results of an earlier international workshop on conservation priorities in Madagascar, held in 1995 (Rakotosamimanana & Ganzhorn, 1995; Ganzhorn et al., 1997). It also had the participants review the value of existing protected areas and other sites that held a high conservation value but that were not in the national system. Special emphasis was placed on identifying marine, coastal and wetland priorities as these ecosystems had received relatively little attention to date, except among a few specialized NGOs. Identifying marine and coastal priorities required close coordination with the Marine and Coastal Environment unit (Ecosystèmes Marins et Côtiers, EMC) within the National Environment Office that coordinates NEAP agencies. Wetland conservation was also raised high on the agenda since Madagascar signed and ratified the RAMSAR Convention in 1998. The scientific workshop was especially useful in reviewing the relative value of existing protected areas and in signalling new and as yet unprotected sites that are known or suspected to be high biodiversity priorities. Marine and coastal ecoregions were proposed to help ensure that the diverse habitats were well represented in the protected area system as they have received less attention than terrestrial ecoregions so far. Some terrestrial sub-ecoregions were also proposed, aimed at ensuring adequate representation of suspected geographical variations in biodiversity. It was emphasized that the proposed marine ecoregions and terrestrial sub-ecoregions were identified more on the basis of management decision making than on pure biodiversity or bioclimatic differentiation. The workshop also emphasized the need for a broad geographic coverage by protected areas within the constraints of a severely reduced distribution and fragmentation of natural habitats. The rationale for this is based on the known high degree of geographical variation in species composition, even over relatively short distances. The workshop participants noted that all well-surveyed sites had at least some locally endemic plant and vertebrates that appear to be unique to the locality. They also noted that Malagasy terrestrial
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habitats are best viewed as a continuum of change, even though broad ecoregional distinctions were made. Step 2: Analysis of management strategies and priorities The second step in the Plan’s development was a four-day workshop on management strategies and priorities, held in October 1999. More than 80 participants represented all levels of management within ANGAP, together with representatives of NGOs, aid agencies and other NEAP partners. The workshop examined strategies and priorities within each of the five principal management sectors of ANGAP: conservation; research and ecological monitoring; information, education and communication; sustainable development; and ecotourism. Day 1 was devoted to an analysis of the current management situation in each existing protected area and, where possible, to potential future sites identified during the scientific workshop. The analysis was based on set questionnaires that eventually allowed comparisons between perceived threats and opportunities on one hand, and management resource allocations on the other. A second day involved a similar analysis but looking five years ahead. Using the experience garnered during Day 1 and following a similar questionnaire methodology, the participants were able to use apparent discrepancies between threats, opportunities and management priorities to set a clearer vision of what needs to be done in the future. The two-days’ work was also carried out by ANGAP’s management region, with each group comprising representatives from the regional office or parks and reserves under its jurisdiction. One of the most useful products was a summary map produced by each group that provided an instant visual overview of how priorities were perceived geographically for each management region. The next two days treated each of the management components on a national scale. Most of the work involved defining management strategies under different conditions. For two management components, we were able to rank the protected areas and assign them priorities. In this case, the priorities themselves had to be set even before the strategy could be developed. For example, using a combination of level of threat and estimated biodiversity value, four priority levels for conservation were identified, each with a different degree of intervention. Research, information, education and communication, together with sustainable development, were less readily prioritized; rather, it was considered best to set out general guidelines considering what ANGAP should do under different conditions. An additional theme was added to the analysis: the legal status of ANGAP and protected areas. A proposed new legal code is currently being reviewed for approval and allows for national protected areas to be run directly by ANGAP or an organization mandated by it, plus ‘agreed’ parks or reserves that may be managed directly by a regional government, community organization or a private entity. Protected areas can only obtain an ‘agreed’ status if their management conforms to standards set out by ANGAP. A second legislative question was also asked: how should parks and reserves be classified, and on what basis? This was raised partly as, at the beginning of the NEAP, ANGAP ranked protected areas according to a series of criteria that led to the creation of four classes. As the parks and reserves were rather poorly known at the time it is hardly surprising that the classification was not entirely satisfactory, especially as priority was given to ecotourism potential. The question was also asked
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in order to determine whether the existing official protected area designations such as special reserves was still appropriate, or should a simpler nomenclature be used. The reasons for this include recent and proposed status changes for some sites from strict nature reserve to national park, and because some of the most important tourism sites are special reserves, normally established to protect a specific landscape, habitat or species. The management workshop was critical insofar as bringing real ownership of the Plan to all levels of ANGAP. The Plan’s contents was clearly decided by a large number of ANGAP personnel, and they had the opportunity to validate and refine the conclusions of the scientific workshop. Step 3: Regional reviews of the Plan In February 2000 four regional two-day workshops for the six provinces were organized to review and revise the first draft of a technical report that would be the basis of the Plan. The report provided the technical arguments for structuring the future protected area system and provided a consolidated summary of biodiversity and management strategies and priorities. Biodiversity arguments were considered too technical for inclusion in the final published version of the Plan, but needed to be available to readers interested in understanding the rationale used. Management arguments were more comprehensible to a wider non-specialist audience and were to be put directly into the Plan without changes. The workshops were organized by the respective regional directors and constituted a series of presentations followed by discussion and working group sessions to improve the content. The regional workshops were essential in finalizng the Plan. Each workshop was attended by 12 to 27 persons including Head Office staff, regional office staff, one or two people from each protected area concerned, and representatives from other NEAP agencies. Little contention existed regarding ecoregions and the structure of the future protected area system, but the workshops radically improved management strategies and priorities. Indeed, each workshop ended with a consensual management prioritization for each protected area and regional office. The workshops also strengthened the sense of ownership for the plan within ANGAP. Step 4: Final review of the draft Plan report Once the modifications recommended by the regional workshops were incorporated into the Plan technical report, the latter was reviewed by a committee of Head Office and regional ANGAP directors. The few final modifications were then built into the Plan itself and submitted to ANGAP for final review. Once approved internally, the Plan must go to ANGAP’s board and to the Ministry of the Environment for final approval.
THE PLAN: CHALLENGES AND RESPONSES Developing the Plan will require at least a full year. This is not a surprise given that it is essentially a political statement of ANGAP’s intentions and may commit land to conservation throughout the country. In this section, we therefore discuss the most challenging elements of the Plan and how they were dealt with.
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Biodiversity representation The principal challenge regarding terrestrial environments was a perceived inconsistency concerning biodiversity patterns in different major taxonomic groups. Most analyses have focused on plant biodiversity and only a few deal with specific animal groups. Although there is a general separation between the more humid forests in the east and the seasonally dry forests in the west and south, certain taxonomic groups did not fit existing plant or bioclimatic ecoregion models. While no model is perfect for all groups, the scientific workshop participants decided that ecoregions as currently defined do not answer the basic question: Can biodiversity be represented by having a protected area in each and every ecoregion and sub-ecoregion, even using the most complicated existing and widely accepted model? Because of the very high levels of taxonomic turnover, ecoregions thus only give a relatively coarse approximation to biodiversity variation, and other factors must be employed. The latter were essentially: (1) selection of sites with known or suspected unique species assemblages; (2) the distance between any two protected areas must not be too great (but unspecified), wherever possible; and (3) accepted ecoregions may need to be subdivided somewhat artificially for management purposes where rapid habitat transitions occur due to marked relief/climate gradients, or because at large an ecoregion may be essentially transformed by human activities, leaving scattered remnants that differ noticeably from each other because of their geographical or climatic separation. In spite of numerous biological studies in recent years and major museum collecting expeditions in the past, it also became apparent that our understanding of biodiversity patterns is still difficult to perceive from existing data. The workshops made a strong appeal for a greater focus on this issue. In addition, it is clearly timely to encourage scientists to produce syntheses or overviews of available results to improve our understanding of biodiversity at the national or the regional level. An associated challenge that arose was the number, size, and distribution of protected areas in the future. The severely reduced and fragmented nature of remaining terrestrial habitats, combined with high species turnover, means that: (1) protected areas are forced to be relatively small; and (2) numerous protected areas are required if a reasonable representation of biodiversity is to be achieved. Some 47 protected areas already exist and many believe this is too great a number for the country’s economic and skilled human resources to manage adequately. Before the Plan was developed, there was thus widespread agreement within the conservation and political communities that adding more than a few new sites would overburden an already stretched management organization. However, given that marine, coastal and wetlands are significantly under-represented in the existing system meant that the ‘few’ additional sites would be used up even before major terrestrial centres of diversity or endemism were considered. The partial solution was to present most of the new sites for further investigation before any decision to create a new park was made. The problem of distribution of existing and proposed protected areas is linked to the distribution of remaining natural habitats, as most now exist in the most inaccessible areas where road or rail access is severely limited. It remains unclear even with the Plan’s recommendations how some of the more remote sites will be adequately
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protected before further encroachment reduces their conservation value. All that can be said is that at present ANGAP is committed to providing protection, in many cases with the help of partner organizations such as NGOs. It has been noted already that marine, coastal and freshwater ecosystems have not been studied adequately to define even the most basic ecoregions. However, we are satisfied that at least the somewhat artificial regions defined during the scientific workshop allow priority marine protected areas to be chosen relatively quickly, even if additional sites are identified later. Wetlands are more problematic, but the workshop was able to identify priority habitats and/or sites. We also note that western and southern ecoregions were considerably less represented than eastern ecoregions. One of the most striking elements of ANGAP's conservation strategy is its active promotion of integrated conservation and sustainable development within broad regional programs to support its protected area activities. There is little doubt that maintaining existing biodiversity cannot be achieved by protected areas alone as it would require that the majority of remaining terrestrial habitats are classified as parks or reserves, a political and socio-economic proposition that is unacceptable. At least five major regional initiatives currently exist and in four of these existing protected areas are anchor points, around which remaining natural habitats are sustainably utilized or left as primarily conservation areas with only minimal resource extraction. Such programs appear to be vital for the future of Malagasy biodiversity and it is salutary that the national and regional leaders are incorporating them into their development policies. Management strategies and priorities ANGAP and its partners are clearly pleased that this section was included in the Plan and protected area managers have been seeking clear guidelines that would let each see how each park or reserve fits into the overall system, and how to focus their efforts. Policy and law: Before examining practical management issues, we note that ANGAP quickly adopted the IUCN protected area classification system. Among the perceived advantages is that it is based on an objective-ranked matrix of activities desired in each protected area, rather than having too much emphasis on any single factor such as ecotourism. Secondly, it is easy for people unfamiliar with Madagascar to identify the major purposes of each park or reserve. ANGAP is also currently considering reducing the legal classification to either national parks or strict nature reserves, especially given that special reserves are so varied in their attributes. Marine and coastal sites would be specifically identified, such as marine national parks. One of the central issues was: what are the criteria for creating a national versus an approved 1 protected area? This complicated and politically charged question will be resolved by taking the following steps. Firstly, the site’s strategic value regarding biodiversity representation will be assessed. If it is strategically essential, the 1
The term used in French is agréé, which could also be interpreted as “agreed-upon”
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protected area will always be considered to be a contribution to the national system, regardless of the management authority. Secondly, each site will be considered in terms of cultural, social and, where appropriate, economic significance. For example, if a sacred or otherwise culturally significant site is selected, the local communities and political authorities may propose to create an approved instead of a national protected area. As interest in creating approved parks and reserves is likely to be financial in many cases, ANGAP will mount an information campaign, at least in the early stages, to demonstrate that the economic advantages should be carefully assessed as the cost of management far exceeds direct revenues. Conservation management: Conservation management was a major preoccupation in the management and regional workshops because ANGAP reaffirmed the need to make this a priority. Thus, it was agreed to first prioritize all protected areas and subsequently to propose activity packages for each priority class. We found it most efficient to define first a basic package for the lowest priority class. Essentially, this ensured that there was an adequate response to: (1) threats; and (2) evolving ecological conditions. It also ensured that the level of monitoring was adequate. Each subsequent priority ranking had additional or intensified activities depending on its specific characteristics. For example, priority rank 3 is typified by lower levels of threat but exceptional biodiversity, whereas rank 2 is classified as higher threat and high (but not exceptional) biodiversity. Rank 3 emphasized intensified research and monitoring while rank 2 emphasized threat control. There is of course a considerable degree of flexibility as ranks are not hard and fast, and conditions can and do change rapidly. Research and ecological monitoring: Research and monitoring in Malagasy protected areas has been variable in its success or applicability to date. It was therefore rewarding to see that the workshops put considerable emphasis on these activities. Essentially, the Plan first sets out basic guidelines for research and monitoring together with a minimum package for protected areas. Secondly, it identifies parks and reserves with strong potential to attract researchers and so increase information and bring in useful revenues. Thirdly, the Plan addresses how individual research programs should work with improved focus on planning to clearly identify key questions and to ensure that data is analysed and made available in an understandable format in a timely way. This is linked to a general ANGAP perception that research must be more focused on management issues in the future, although individual researchers will not be prohibited from more esoteric scientific subjects. Relationships between park managers and research organizations were a major point for debate. The value of developing long-term relations with academic institutions is not doubtful as ANGAP does not possess the resources to realize its research priorities. However, past experiences have shown that some institutions have produced little management value and results have been difficult to obtain. In a few instances, foreign researchers and students have benefited greatly from agreements with ANGAP, but the required support to Malagasy academic institutions has been inadequate. ANGAP’s response to these difficulties will be to negotiate (or renegotiate) collaborative agreements that respond to the interests of all parties concerned but – most importantly – set out unequivocal guidelines to ensure that research brings net benefits to the Association and Malagasy research institutions.
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Information, education and communication: This element of the NEAP has been the most problematic throughout all agencies within the program. ANGAP’s main emphasis will be to participate in the national environmental program at a level deemed appropriate to specific local circumstances and wherever possible in partnership with other agencies. For example, if a major regional conservation and sustainable development program is developing, ANGAP’s regional office and local parks and reserves will increase their contribution to environmental education activities that always accompany such a program. This requires specialist staff. At the other extreme where protected area staffing is low and not involved in major regional programs, ANGAP will ensure that its rangers have at least basic outreach training and always develop good communications with neighbouring communities. Sustainable development: ANGAP has donated 50% of its direct ecotourism revenues to local community development mini-projects since the first phase of the NEAP. These mini-projects are restricted to a zone of influence around the park or reserve, and are decided by community representatives in consultation with their respective communities. However, while these projects are valuable in generating local tolerance or support to protected areas, they neither address the major local developmental or economic needs, nor do they guarantee that local people will respect the park or reserve. For this reason ANGAP is an active supporter of ecoregional programs that attract external financial backing, local political buy-in and development agencies. ANGAP’s strategy is essentially to participate as fully as possible within the constraints of available resources. This may be in response to the requests of other partners or may be the result of perceived needs to play a more active promotional role to attract additional agencies. Specific activities may include participation in inventories and assessments of natural habitats outside protected areas in order to determine their most appropriate management strategies, the identification of development priorities around parks and reserves, or acting as a bridge between community organizations and developmental agencies. Ecotourism: Setting strategies and priorities for ecotourism was generally the most contentious of the management section of the Plan. During the early days of the NEAP ecotourism was seen as a major means of generating revenue from natural areas and expectations were often unrealistic. However, as the workshops increasingly provided a more holistic overview of the entire system, personnel at each protected area were able to place the ecotourism potential of their respective sites in a more realistic and balanced framework. The Plan first categorizes the potential for ecotourism in each existing and some proposed protected areas. Category 1 is assigned to those parks and reserves either known to be key attractions based on existing or projected general tourism circuits developed by private companies and the Ministry of Tourism. Category two designates sites that are likely to be optional, yet relatively well visited venues, while Category three denotes sites reserved for specialist visitors such as ornithological groups and wilderness hikers with relatively low numbers. A fourth category indicates sites that have an alternative role such as strict conservation of rare and fragile habitats, or have an unknown or uneconomic potential for reasons of poor access or low tourist attraction. The latter category comprises the majority of protected areas.
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Having established priorities, a basic package of interventions was designated for Category three parks and reserves. This is considered the minimum for any ecotourism program in protected areas and concentrates on environmental protection, impact monitoring and visitor security. Category one and two sites were progressively allocated more intense interventions in order to absorb the impact of large visitor volume and to maintain visit quality. Each of these packages has a degree of flexibility and depends to a considerable extent on securing aid agency support for infrastructure development, together with cooperation with the private sector for investment and services. Once the sensitive prioritization phase was completed, consensus on the intervention packages was easily obtained. One of the most contentious issues was that of guides. The main issues are whether guides should be obligatory, as they are at present, and the quality of services that they provide. In response, the Plan proposes that guiding is only to be obligatory where visitor safety could be a concern and proposes a greater focus on guide training, testing and grading, and monitoring. Authors of travel guide books will also be invited to visit in order to provide comprehensive informational support. ANGAP is also currently developing an information-rich guide to parks and reserves on the internet, a service that will be free. OPERATIONAL STRATEGIES AND PRIORITIES This chapter is of great interest to ANGAP personnel and supporting aid agencies. It summarizes all that has been presented beforehand by management region and is accompanied by a brief description of the main characteristics and issues of the region in question. Already the draft Plan report has had a direct impact: the Head Office is able to pre-structure its national budget more easily by site and by management theme, corresponding to provisional budgetary requests from regional directors. Financial agencies and political decision makers also appreciate the extra information that allows them to understand at a glance the directions that ANGAP will take in the future and what the Association’s needs will be. CONCLUSIONS Going beyond the traditional national system plan to present management and operational strategies and priorities is clearly considered to provide added value to the Plan in Madagascar. We hope that the lessons learned from assembling the Plan and its internal rationale will be of interest and, perhaps, of use to protected area planners in other countries. The Plan technical report will soon be available in French and English on the ANGAP internet site. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Plan was developed through a broad participatory process involving ANGAP's personnel at all levels of the organization, as well as numerous partners. We would like to extend our thanks to all those who participated in the workshops, and later commented on early drafts of the Plan.
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REFERENCES Cornet, A. (1974) Essai de cartographie bioclimatique à Madagascar. explicative de l'ORSTOM, 55. Paris, France.
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Du Puy, D. J. & J. Moat (1996) A refined classification of the primary vegetation of Madagascar based on the underlying geology: using GIS to map its distribution and assess its conservation status. Pages 215-218 in WR. Lourenço (ed.), Biogéographie de Madagascar. Editions de l'ORSTOM, Paris, France. Faramalala, M. H. (1988) Etude de la végétation de Madagascar à l'aide des données spatiales. Thèse de Doctorat. Université de Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. Faramalala, M. H. (1995) Cartographie de la végétation de Madagascar. Abstracts of the International Symposium - Biogeography of Madagascar. Société de Biogéographie, Paris. Faramalala, M. H. & Conservation International (1995). Formations végétales et domaine forestier de Madagascar. 1:1,000,000 color map. Conservation International, Washington, D.C. Ganzhorn, J., B. Rakotosamimanana, L. Hannah, J. Hough, L. Iyer, S. Olivieri, S. Rajaobelina, C. Rosdtrom & G. Tilkin (1997) Priorities for Biodiversity Conservation in Madagascar. Primate Report 48-1: 1 - 81. Humbert, H. (1965) Description des types de végétation. In H. Humbert and G. Cours Darne (eds.), Notice de la carte de Madagascar. Volume 6. Travaux de la Section Scientifique et Technique de l'Institut Français de Pondichéry (hors série). Humbert, H. & Cours Darne, G. (1965) Carte internationale du tapis végétal et des conditions écologiques. 3 coupures au 1/1,000,000 de Madagascar. Travaux de la Section Scientifique et Technique de l'Institut Français de Pondichéry (hors série). IUCN/UNEP/WWF (1987) Madagascar, an environmental profile. M. D. Jenkins (ed.). Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, U.K. Mittermeier, R., P. Robles Gil & C. Goettsch-Mittermeier (1997) Megadiversity. Earth's biologically wealthiest nations. 501 pages. CEMEX, Mexico Mittermeier, R., N. Meyers, C. Goettsch-Mittermeier & P. Robles Gil (1999) Hotspots. Earth's biologically richest and most endangered terrestrial ecoregions. 430 pages. CEMEX, Mexico. Nicoll, M.E & O. Langrand (1989) Madagascar: Revue de la Conservation et des Aires Protégées. WWF, Gland, Suisse. xvii + 374pp., illustré. Rakotosamimanana, B. & J. Ganzhorn (1995) Rapport final de l'Atelier scientifique sur la Définition des Priorités de Conservation de la Diversité Biologique à Madagascar, 10-14 avril 1995, Hôtel Panorama, Antananarivo, Madagascar. Projet PRIF-FEM/GEF, ONE, Direction des Eaux et Forêts, ANGAP, PNUD, Conservation International, Antananarivo.
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Economic Design Principles for Forest Protected Areas Amar Inamdar Abstract This paper critically reviews assumptions about trade-offs between financial sustainability and biological richness of protected areas. In particular, we use practical examples and case studies to ask how location (proximity to people and place) and design (management and utilization strategies) of forest PAs influence financial sustainability. We review a range of financial and economic tools that have been used to improve the financial viability of PAs, drawing out good practice and identifying lessons learned along the way. We conclude that financial viability and conservation are best achieved when PA managers follow design principles based on internalizing economic externalities.
Amar Inamdar Director Synergy The Oxford Centre for Innovation Mill Street Oxford OX2 OJX UNITED KINGDOM email:
[email protected]
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Economic Design Principles for Forest Protected Areas Amar Inamdar Introduction Conserving tropical forests has benefits as well as costs for society. But many of the benefits are diffuse: they accrue to a variety of stakeholders at local, national and international levels. Meanwhile, rural people in the developing world face the costs of managing forests, and of foregoing alternative land-use opportunities. For development to be sustainable, the trade-offs between costs and benefits need to be recognized and a management approach designed that deals with the public and private goods aspects of forests. In this paper, I address three questions: • • •
What role can tropical forests play in national development? How do we help people to decide on the ‘optimal’ level of forest conservation? What kinds of economic tools can we use to achieve forest conservation at the least cost?
Tropical Forests and National Development The OECD has developed a framework to encourage its member countries to better integrate environment and development (see Table 1) 2 . The first step is to define sustainable development as increasing capital stocks. Capital stocks include three primary components: • • •
Human assets (e.g. skills, education and health) Natural assets (e.g. forests, fish, minerals and oil) Produced assets (e.g. infrastructure and factories).
To some extent, the model assumes that there is some substitutability between the different types of capital. This means, for example, that it is possible to convert natural capital into produced assets, and produced assets into human assets.
2
Integrating Economics and the Environment, OECD, 1998
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Table 1. A process for integrating environment and development Activity
Context for Sustainable Development Establish overall goal of Macroeconomic goal and ‘constant capital stock’ definition of sustainable development as ‘constant or rising value of assets’ Measure a redefined GNP should relate to GNP sustainable national income that can be secured without running down capital assets Attach economic values Failure to do so will lead to environmental services to excess environmental degradation
Implementation Goal underlies modified GNP approach
Primarily macroeconomic tool
a
Correct assessment of costs associated with depletion and the contribution of environmental assets to development Correctly price economic Polluter Pays Principle. Correct shadow pricing of inputs and outputs Failure to price correctly transnational corporation will lead to excess investment costs and environmental benefits degradation Avoid investments and Being sustainable by not Importance of correct policies likely to impose making the future worse valuation. Possible major irreversible costs off compared to the implication for the on future generations present discount rate Managing a portfolio of assets for sustainable development At least some deforestation is acceptable because it can contribute to development. Capitalizing on natural assets is one of the few ways for poorer countries to develop. Countries that are well endowed with capital assets need to manage their portfolio to improve the standard of living for their people. This seems evident from the data, which shows that less developed countries tend to deforest faster than richer countries (Figure 1). In order to meet the goal of constant or increasing capital stocks, income from drawing down on assets, needs to be reinvested into other productive stock for the benefit of society. Expenditure on ‘current account’ activities for consumption (like buying cars and weapons) is generally not a financially sustainable strategy. Thus, sustainability is primarily an issue of good governance. Good governance means that government is truly representative of social interests, and accountable to the public for its decisions. Assuming good governance, every dollar spent on conserving forests is one less dollar spent on other social development objectives. A key goal is to achieve the most forest conservation at the least cost. This frees-up public finance for a better social return on investment.
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Figure 1. Rates of Deforestation in low, middle and high income countries.
0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4
% change deforestation 19901995
Low income (GNP per capita=$520) Middle Income (GNP per capita=$2990) High Income (GNP per capita=$25480)
0.3 0.2 0.1 0 -0.1 -0.2 1
Country Income Group
The second step in integrating forests into Green accounting: some general principles national development is to improve a • Deforestation (or mining) is recorded as depreciation of capital assets country’s balance sheet and accounting • The value of capital stocks is estimated as the principles. ‘Greening-up’ national accounts international market price of produced items involves the integration of the real costs and less full costs of extraction = ‘resource rent’ benefits of environmental services into • Economic effects of deforestation (like loss of accounts. There are several ways of doing hydrological services to downstream users) are this. A good example comes from also included. Indonesia, where WRI calculated ‘Net Domestic Product’ (Figure 2). This shows that, when we treat natural resource expenditure as capital depreciation, real economic growth is substantially lower than current estimates. The World Bank uses another measure - ‘Genuine Savings Rates’ to analyse whether countries are pursuing sustainable development strategies or not. The result of this analysis is the same: traditional national reporting over-estimates economic growth. The optimal level of forest conservation Two pieces of information can help guide decisions over how to decide the optimal level of forest conservation in any one country. These are: • The values of forests, so that we can better understand the costs to society of deforestation • The costs of alternative forest conservation measures.
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Figure 2. Comparing the traditional GDP rate with Net Domestic Product
16000 14000 12000 10000 8000
GDP NDP
6000 4000
83 19
81 19
79 19
77 19
75 19
73 19
19
71
2000 0
The values of forests Forests have a broad range of economic values including direct, indirect and option values (Figure 3). The values of forest accrue to different stakeholder groups in different ways. Direct values – like timber and NTFPs – tend to deliver benefits to local stakeholders in the near to medium term. Option values – like the future values of genetic resources, tend to accrue to global stakeholders, generally over the longer term. Of course, this generalization has exceptions, but it is a useful way to illustrate the values of forests. Forests share many of the characteristics of common property resources in that they have public and private values (Table 2). Public values have particular characteristics – they tend to be diffuse and accrue to multiple stakeholders. A good example is climate regulation services. It is often difficult to prevent people benefiting from these services, even though those people have not necessarily paid the costs of maintaining forests. Under these circumstances a market may not exist which allocates resources efficiently and the result is market failure. Often, there is no reason to expect individuals to promote community interests, or communities to promote national interests, so it is important for government (or some other socially accountable entity) to intervene through creating the right incentives, property rights and regulations to promote social welfare.
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Figure 3. The range of forest values Value type
Sub -type
Example
Time frame
Direct
Consumptive
Subsistence products ; NTFPs
Productive
Timber products
Non -consumptive
Nature tourism
Non-use value
Existence & cultural values
Indirect
Ecological services
Option values
Future values of outbreeding etc.
Short term, local
Long term, global
Table 2. Public and Private Values of Forests Public Values Environmental services Climate regulation, water and soil maintenance
Private Values Natural resources Timber, NTFPs, genetic resources
Future values Genetic diversity Amenity values Shared resources and Cultural values
Amenity values Tourism
Identifying and quantifying the values of forests is important because it helps us to understand what society loses as a result of deforestation. The costs of sustainable forest management It is important to recognize that forest conservation measures have discreet costs. First there are the costs of maintaining forests. These might include the costs of land, labour and capital employed. Estimates for these costs are seldom declared and it is difficult to present detailed analyses. In terms of management costs, estimates vary between $150 and $250 per hectare per annum3 . We should recognize, though, that these costs are only recurrent expenditure. The majority of these costs are tied up in capital – land costs. Most often, these costs are ‘hidden’ because forest PAs are created by government decree with little compensation to local inhabitants 4 . A second set of costs is opportunity costs associated with alternative options for land use. Land currently used for forestry is usually fertile and thus could be used for 3
James A. et al, Parastatal Governance of State Protected Areas in Africa and the Caribbean, WWF International, Gland, Switzerland, 2000 4 Inamdar A. et al, Capitalising on Nature: Protected Area Management, Science, vol. 283, March 1999.
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many alternative sources of income. Where these alternative uses present better economic and social benefits to landowners and land users, deforestation becomes rational. Clearly, the policy framework of incentives and disincentives for livelihood options has an important bearing on these decisions and tilts the balance between decisions towards forestry or towards deforestation. Towards optimal forest conservation – identifying the ‘low hanging fruit’ of cheap interventions which reduce deforestation Optimal forest conservation is a pragmatic position. It aims to balance the costs to society of conserving forests against the costs to society of deforestation. The variables set out in the previous section help society to assess the trade-offs between deforestation and forest conservation (Table 3). Table 3. Trade-offs between deforestation and forest conservation Social costs of deforestation
Costs of forest conservation
• •
• •
Outright protection Regulatory tools
• •
Market-based instruments Community forestry schemes
• •
Loss of watershed protection. Loss of climate regulation services (estimated at $20 per tonne) Loss of communal resources and amenities Loss of biodiversity values (estimated by global willingness to pay?)
We can use a simple model to estimate the ‘optimal’ level of deforestation by comparing the costs to society of marginal damage to forests (MD) against the marginal costs of conserving forest (MCC) (Figure 4). In this model, we can see that at 100% depletion of forest the costs of forest conservation are low (or nil) but the costs to society of deforestation (MD) are at their highest. Conversely, at 0% forest depletion, the costs of forest conservation (MCC) are at their highest, whilst the costs to society of deforestation are at their lowest. Clearly, an optimal conservation strategy will reflect the point where the marginal costs of conservation meet the marginal benefits – i.e. where the two lines intersect.
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Figure 4. Finding the optimal rate of deforestation 100 MD Low cost interventions that deliver large reductions in deforestation rates
MCC
$
0 100 Depletion of forest 0
The curves reflect the reality that initial deforestation may impose few costs on society, but climate regulation or hydrological functions of forests may fall off rapidly as thresholds are crossed. Similarly, the effectiveness of conservation measures varies: some measures, like changes in tax regimes or removal of perverse subsidies may be cheap to implement, but return high gains in terms of reduced rates of deforestation. Optimal management strategies seek to identify the most cost-effective measures to achieve conservation – the ‘low hanging fruit’ in management parlance.
Management Instruments to Achieve Conservation Effective conservation tools minimize the costs of forest conservation and avoid the costs of deforestation by efficiently capturing the diversity of public and private values associated with forests. Such tools focus on markets, regulations, and public disclosure. Table 4: Policies and Instruments for Sustainable Forest Management
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Using markets • • • • •
Creating Markets
Environmental Regulations
Engaging the Public
Subsidy Reduction Targeted Subsidies
•
Property Rights
•
Standards
•
Decentralization
•
Bans
•
Public Participation
Environmental Taxes User Fees Deposit-Refund Systems
•
Tradable permits/rights International Offset Systems
•
Permits/Quotas
•
Information Disclosure
•
Using markets Market-based tools are receiving increased attention in many countries as a way to improve environmental quality and practice. These tools include innovative tax-andsubsidy approaches (e.g. Polluter Pays, User Pays, Performance bonds). Marketbased tools tend to be cheaper to administer (due to the creation of market incentives for participants) and often also produce a ‘double dividend’ because they work by changing investment behaviour, as well as creating revenue for management. For example, ‘Polluter Pays’ taxes promote environmental best practice among forestrelated industry and generate revenue for sustainable forestry projects. Internationally, taxes can be imposed upon imports of timber (such as Brazil’s valueadded Tax), as long as the transfer of revenue to the government is efficient and avoids leakage into other sectors of trade. Box 1. Taxes and Performance Bonds in Costa Rica In Costa Rica, a 10% tax on stumpage value was set in 1996. Loggers are now required to place a 20% deposit on stumpage value with the government. The government guarantees that this money will be returned if trees are replanted sustainably. This is known as a ‘performance bond’ as the return of the deposit is dependent upon the performance of the bondholder. Loggers are also charged for road maintenance and other services. Stumpage taxes, reforestation deposits and service fees are thus used to improve the sustainability and return on forest assets.
Creating markets Perhaps the most innovative and promising way of conserving forests is by creating or enforcing property rights that encourage investment. Market creation, like carbon offset trading designed by the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, involves researching which aspects of the forest are marketable on a local, national or international level and then setting up the institutions for trade and financial investment. Tradable development rights (TDRs) are also used in U.S. forestry, especially in the settling of property rights for small farm-owners and indigenous peoples. Costa Rica has gone furthest in developing coherent property rights for the environmental services that forests provide (Box 2). Market creation need not be complex. Auctioning leases and concessions in national parks are a way of creating markets that are commonplace throughout the world. Box 2. Marketing forest services in Costa Rica The National Forestry Fund (FONAFIFO) was established in Costa Rica to administer finance for forests. This fund markets explicit forest services 225 to consumers, including carbon fixation,
Regulatory approaches Regulations have a role to play, especially where markets are poorly developed or institutions are weak. Forest conservation policies in the developing world have tended to rely heavily on regulations like bans or gazetting of PAs. Logging, in particular, can be made subject to strict quotas, such as the zonation concession quotas in Brazil and Malaysia. The disadvantage of many regulations is that they are often expensive to police and implement. Engaging the public Public disclosure helps to keep both managers and operators on track. It does so by encouraging corporate and government responsibility through increasing accountability to stakeholders (either shareholders or constituents). Disclosure of activities can be required and regulated by the government, although voluntary selfreporting (‘environmental and social auditing’) is becoming a competitive advantage in places where information dispersal and consumer choice are extensive. Certification schemes such as the Forestry Stewardship Council and ISO14000 give customers a standard by which to judge the sustainability of extraction and reforestation practices. The schemes also supply guidelines and recommendations to loggers, based upon the audits undertaken. However, consumer willingness to pay for such certified products has not yet reached levels high enough to compensate for the higher costs of production.
Box 3. Indonesia’s approach to pollution control: information disclosure A programme in Indonesia demonstrates how information disclosure can be a powerful tool. The programme is an independent project that works through a widely publicised information network and is known as PROPER, the Programme for Pollution Control Evaluation and Rating. It awards ‘star’ ratings to companies, depending on whether or not they meet national standards. PROPER also works in conjunction with companies to improve their star rating before going public. As a result, a significant proportion of companies improved their performance in just five months.
Conclusion Effective forest management requires nations to put forests into context as a national asset and then estimate, within this context, the optimal rates of deforestation. A criteria matrix can be used to compare the various conservation tools and identify the most appropriate for any given set of circumstances (Table 5). Table 5. Criteria matrix for conservation tools
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Political economy aspects
Distribution of costs
Imperfect competition
Uncertainty of response
Uncertainty
Technical capacity
Damage
Instruments ↓
Efficiency
Criteria →
Taxes/charges on inputs Taxes/charges on outputs Subsidies D e posit -r e f u n d systems Regulations and liability Accreditation and labelling
The first step is to estimate the value of environmental assets accurately. Better definition of GNP and improved national accounting to include human, natural, and produced capital, is one positive step forward. This will allow for the selection of the most cost-effective instruments to achieve conservation. The challenge is to ensure that the most forest conservation is obtained for the least cost to society. This means understanding the costs to society of deforestation, as well as the costs of alternative management approaches. The best strategies take full account of the public as well as private values of forests and, as a result, market-based instruments are gaining wider application in this area. But market creation, regulations, and public disclosure policies must also be appropriate to national circumstances and promote good governance. Sound economic instruments are unlikely alone to promote socially equitable outcomes.
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World Wildlife Fund Canada’s Endangered Spaces Campaign Arlin Hackman
Abstract Launched by World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF-Canada) in 1989, the Endangered Spaces Campaign mobilized a ten-year effort within Canada’s conservation community to complete an ecologically representative protected areas system nationwide. WWF recruited government commitments to this goal and also developed and employed a gap-analysis methodology which, together with an annual progress report, provided a consistent science-based foundation for assessing performance nationwide. This paper outlines the methodology, provides examples of its application in land and resource planning decisions, assesses the overall results achieved regarding forest protected areas, and identifies learning points for ongoing protected areas designation and management. More than 1,000 new protected areas were established during the campaign. As of 1999, 107 of Canada’s 384 forested natural regions were judged to be adequately or moderately represented by permanently protected areas with no logging and the total forest area of Canada so protected had reached 8.2%.
Arlin Hackman Vice President of Conservation World Wildlife Fund Canada 245 Eglinton Avenue East Suite 410, Toronto Ontario M4P 3J1 CANADA email:
[email protected]
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World Wildlife Fund Canada’s Endangered Spaces Campaign Arlin Hackman
Eroding a Global Heritage Canada has long enjoyed an international reputation as a gentle, peace-loving society and a world leader in conservation. While our history of international aggression is blessedly brief, we have shown ourselves to be as capable as any other nation in waging war on our natural environment. Our vast prairies are among the most altered habitats on the planet. Today, less than 1% of the original tallgrass prairie remains. More than 70% of the original wetlands around the Great Lakes, some of the most species-rich habitats in our country, are gone. Not surprisingly, the 340 species now officially at risk of extinction in Canada are concentrated in these endangered habitats. One half of our vast national territory is forested, accounting for 10% of the world’s forests, including one third of the world’s boreal forests and one fifth of the rapidly disappearing temperate rain forest. Much of our forest is still original, essentially the result of natural disturbance. Indeed, the World Resources Institute considers Canada to have one quarter of the world’s remaining “frontier forest” large, relatively undisturbed forest areas capable of maintaining native biodiversity, including an estimated 140,000 wildlife species (Global Forest Watch Canada, 2000). But we’re quickly overtaking this frontier, too. Roughly half of our forests are already under some form of timber concession and we are now the world’s largest exporter of forest products, logging about one million hectares every year to feed our markets. At this rate, the old growth coastal forest could well be gone within a decade or two. Already less than one per cent of the magnificent old growth red and white pine stands remain in the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence forest region. Roughly the same or less survives of the original Acadian hardwood forest in the Maritime provinces, the Carolinian forest of south western Ontario, the aspen parkland bordering the western prairies and the Garry oak woodlands of Vancouver Island. To the north, much of the extensive fire-generated spruce, pine and fir forest is still intact, and some is still unallocated. But over the past century, the geographic range of woodland caribou, an indicator of disturbance-sensitive species, has steadily contracted, as logging concessions creep north into the boreal forest. And in the past decade, forest licensing, mill expansion, road-building and industrial logging have greatly accelerated in this region. Some of this impact, covering 55,000 to 80,000 hectares annually, occurs through deforestation and the conversion of forest land to other uses such as mines, utility corridors, agriculture and urban development (Global Forest Watch Canada, 2000). But, on the whole, forest exploitation in Canada results in the return of trees so that the extent of wooded areas may actually be increasing regionally, if not nationwide. Therefore, our problem is that, limitless as it appears, wooded as it mostly remains, Canada’s forest estate is measurably declining in quality if not in quantity. In the last century of exploitation there have been human casualties as well. Almost 80% of Canada’s one million Aboriginal people live in communities throughout the forested regions of the country. Their cultural survival is dependent on maintaining traditional ties with the land and wildlife, and as industrial exploitation of our forests has moved north over the past century, First Nations have been pushed into a corner. As well, many of the 330 single-industry communities which led the invasion of our frontier are now in retreat and dying out as we come to the end of cheap access to high quality natural resources.
Setting the Agenda Of course, there has been a visible conservation effort throughout Canadian history, including protected areas and improved resource management practices. Our first National Park, Banff, established in 1885, draws visitors from the four corners of the globe. But, as Banff’s centennial was celebrated in 1985, it was clear that our ad hoc approach to nature protection left it lagging far behind industrial development and hardly qualified us as world leaders. By percentage of territory protected, Canada barely made it into the top 50 countries and the occasional pulse of regional land-use planning or site-specific protection campaigns did not seem about to change that.
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In 1987, a federal government Task Force on Park Establishment recommended that the Canadian national parks system be completed by the year 2000. However, the minister responsible for national parks at that time responded by saying this was impossible. Up until that time there was little sense of public urgency to challenge him. But the 1980s were a time of environmental awakening in Canada and his rejection was out of step with the public’s awakening concern as reflected in escalating valley-by-valley wilderness protection conflicts. Stepping into this public policy leadership vacuum, and building on other international recommendations as outlined in Our Common Future and Caring For the Earth, World Wildlife Fund Canada launched the Endangered Spaces Campaign in 1989. This science-based, advocacy campaign set a specific goal for the country: to complete a network of protected areas representing all of Canada’s natural regions, and totalling at least 12% of Canada’s lands and waters, by the year 2000. As outlined in our campaign mission statement, the Canadian Wilderness Charter, this goal was intended to galvanize a cooperative effort by Canadians to bring about decisions by governments who still own 95% of our nation’s lands and waters. The aim was to seize a time-limited opportunity to preserve examples of all our country’s habitat types, including forests, based on conscious foresight and deliberate planning, rather than forfeit it through continuing ad hoc reactive conflicts. Designing the Campaign How have we designed and conducted the Endangered Spaces Campaign to achieve our goal? In broad terms, the campaign has had three dimensions. Firstly, we have worked to gain and maintain support for the goal from all parts of Canadian society. More than 600,000 individual Canadians and 300 organizations have signed the Canadian Wilderness Charter, making it one of the largest petitions in Canadian history. This includes endorsements from organizations as diverse as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Indigenous Survival International (representing Aboriginal people), the Canadian Labour Congress, the United Church of Canada, the Girl Guides of Canada, and Greenpeace. All this support resulted in unprecedented commitments from government and industry. In 1992, the federal, territorial and provincial government ministers responsible for parks, environment and wildlife signed “A Statement of Commitment” to completing canada’s networks of protected areas, making the year 2000 goal their own. This commitment was subsequently echoed in the Whitehorse Mining Initiative and, most relevant to forests, Canada’s National Forest Strategy which was signed by our forest ministers and industry associations. In 1997, the government of Canada made this a pledge to the world by becoming one of the 22 countries committed to achieving WWF’s global Forests For Life campaign protected areas target. Secondly, we have developed a consistent science-based method of measuring progress on the ground. Having set a business-like agenda, WWF also took responsibility for tracking progress and reporting annually to Canadians as a way of helping to ensure accountability. This meant that we needed an objective way of assessing the contribution of new protected areas to achieving ecological representation. Though the concept of representation was fairly common in professional park planning circles when we began the campaign, there was no agreed-upon method for applying it to real-world ecological analyses and land-use decisions. In fact, we were asked by governments themselves to come up with such a method so that we scored their action consistently. WWF therefore recruited some of the best conservation biologists to help us meet this need, developed a coarse filter gap analysis methodology and applied it to the country. This first-ever national gap analysis became the basis for an annual report, grading each jurisdiction on its progress toward the year 2000 goal and setting action priorities for the coming year. These progress reports and grades maintained periodic visibility and coherence to the otherwise widely dispersed campaign effort. Thirdly, we have supported regional and site-specific action to identify and designate new protected areas. In a country as large and politically decentralized as Canada, any national campaign has to
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combine top-down goals with bottom-up implementation. While the Endangered Spaces Campaign has been coordinated from WWF’s national office in Toronto, its delivery was decentralized through the efforts of regional coordinators supported by WWF in every province and territory, together with a small grants program which funded site-specific protection activity undertaken by local or regional conservation organizations allied with the national campaign. Though, over the decade, we have directly identified and promoted a number of candidate reserves, we stopped short of proposing our own comprehensive list of candidate reserves for the entire country, which could have been very divisive. Instead, we chose to assist the efforts and evaluate the proposals of other parties engaged in local and regional land and resource-planning processes. In effect, the ten-year Endangered Spaces Campaign has amounted to a kind of protected areas system planning process led by a conservation group rather than by government. Wherever possible, WWF has worked in partnership with government protected areas agencies, given our common purpose and planning methods, as well as government’s formal responsibility for protected areas decisions. Understandably, this has been an uneasy relationship at times, due to the fact that WWF has engaged in public advocacy, for example through the release of our annual scorecards. Easing this tension somewhat has been the fact that, following the 1992 ministerial commitments, WWF has been able to legitimately claim that our efforts are simply intended to help government deliver on its own public policy goal. Further, our advocacy has always been designed to be non-partisan and problem-solving in its approach, rather than ideological and confrontational. By setting and working to achieve a ten-year goal, WWF itself made an unprecedented commitment to plan and implement a ten-year programme. This was only possible due to our success in recruiting major multi-year funding commitments for our work. In fact, a handful of major donors signalled early in the campaign that they would stay with us for the full decade, assuring us of at least $1 million per year in core revenue. As a result, we were able to plan our work, including pledging support to our regional partners, with greater certainty than enjoyed by any other conservation campaign in Canada. Measuring Progress in Protection The Canadian Wilderness Charter recognizes many reasons for protecting natural areas including, but not limited to, biodiversity conservation. In focusing the Endangered Spaces Campaign goal on representation, WWF sought the most efficient, science-based strategy for serving them all, at least minimally. While our country still offers a wide range of real-world options for locating and designing reserves to build a network, these options are rapidly disappearing in the face of human-caused habitat loss to such an extent that we can’t save everything. This approach is widely supported, for example, by the principle recommendation of the 1993 Caracas Declaration which urged that national protected areas systems (PAS) be enlarged to safeguard the full representative range of ecosystems of each country. In WWF’s vision of a functional representative PAS, reserves are located, designed and linked together in a network that has the capacity to maintain the evolutionary processes critical to conserving ecological systems and thereby to maintain ecological integrity. Therefore, adequate representation requires more than the mere presence of a protected area in a natural region. Reserves must be in the right place and of the right size, shape and juxtaposition to conserve biodiversity over the long term. They must also meet certain management standards, especially permanent protection from human activities which have the potential to cause large-scale disruption of their natural features and processes. These activities include industrial development such as mining and logging as well as hydroelectric dams and oil and gas development. In other words, WWF looks beyond the formal classification of a reserve, such as ‘national park’ or ‘wildlife area’, to determine if the actual management regime is likely to yield effective conservation. Designing an ecologically representative PAS to meet these standards requires, first of all, an appropriate planning framework in the form of ecological or natural regions with which to guide reserve location and design. The scale at which regions are defined is very important. If too coarse, important pieces of our biological tapestry could be missed. If too fine, the information requirements for a country as large as Canada would be overwhelming and we would not account for some largescale natural processes such as wildfire, which are important to accommodate in reserve design. Ideally, some combination of coarse and fine filter reserve planning is needed to produce the best results.
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For the Endangered Spaces Campaign, which adopted a coarse filter approach, a natural region is defined as a geographic area characterized by broad similarities in landform, geology, climate and vegetation cover, mapped at scales generally ranging from 1:5,000,000 to 1:7,500,000 where regions encompass landscape-level features such as valley systems, and boundaries often reflect fuzzy transitions such as broad physiographic and climatic gradients. Working with the Canadian Council on Ecological Areas and other experts, including Dr Reed Noss and Dr Stan Rowe, WWF’s science team developed a GIS-based gap- analysis methodology to judge how well existing protected areas across Canada exemplify or represent the typical ecological characteristics of these natural regions and therefore what gaps remain to be filled with new reserves. Our methodology is based on the assumption that ecological diversity (and hence biodiversity) is largely an expression of abiotic factors such as climate, physiography, topography and surface geology interacting through time (Kavanagh and Iacobelli, 1995). Once we have reviewed and refined natural regional boundaries to ensure they reflect physiographic and climatic gradients, WWF’s gap analysis then proceeds with the mapping of smaller “enduring features”, the primary elements of ecological diversity, which are essentially landforms or physical habitats that serve as surrogates for species assemblages. For this purpose we rely on a digital nationwide terrain database, the Soil Landscapes of Canada, developed by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and mapped at scales of 1:500,000 to 1:1,000,000. Finally, we assess the relationship between enduring features and biodiversity based on more detailed tertiary data, where available, pertaining to ecological processes and population dynamics of native species. This is typically done at a scale of 1:250,000. The assessment of conservation gaps considers a number of criteria regarding ecological integrity across these spatial scales: environmental gradients, important physical habitat types, size guidelines, connectivity/adjacency, habitat requirements for umbrella species, and habitat quality (“naturalness”) as well as the spatial scales of key ecological processes in the region. Our application of these criteria varies according to broad habitat types (i.e. boreal vs. prairie) and whether the enduring feature is relatively large or small. (e.g. for boreal systems, large enduring features are greater than 700,000 hectares while small enduring features are less than 35,000 hectares.) Table 1 and Figure 1 summarize the steps and representation standards followed in the gap analysis developed at WWF-Canada by Kavanagh and Iacobelli (1995). By comparing mapped enduring features with existing protected area boundaries on a natural region by natural region basis, we determine which enduring features are not yet adequately captured by the PAS and therefore which regions are not yet adequately represented. Map 1 displays the results of our analysis for Canada’s terrestrial natural regions, including those classified as forested. Table 1 General spatial guidelines for assessing the ecological representation of enduring features by existing protected areas. ASSESSMENT Little or no representation Partial representation
Moderate representation
Adequate representation
DESCRIPTION No protected areas or no protected blocks > 200 ha. The enduring feature has at least one protected block of habitat > 200 ha. This is large enough to address stand/patch level dynamics, such as tree fall gaps. The enduring feature includes protected areas of sufficient size to begin to address landscape-scale dynamics. For example, this criterion would be met if protected areas are of equivalent size to the average fire size. Lands in protected areas ranging from 1,000 ha to 10,000 ha often meet this criterion, but depend on the characteristics of the natural region. The enduring feature includes protected areas of sufficient size to address landscape-scale dynamics and/or captures all environmental gradients and the diversity of physical habitats. For a fire-driven forest ecosystem, this may mean protected areas of the order of 500,000 ha.
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Of course, given that forest land-use planning in Canada often occurs after timber concessions have been granted, it is potentially very helpful to be able to relate the results of a protected areas gap analysis to these management areas. In 1999, WWF conducted an analysis along these lines, resulting in the first-ever approximation of where new protected areas are still needed, or not, within each of the 354 individual forest management units already established across Canada (see Map 2). This is a challenging task because the enduring feature framework used in our gap analysis is not spatially nested within forest management units. As a result, we simplified the analytical steps to derive an assessment of the probability that large (e.g. >50,000 hectares), small or no new protected areas are still needed within a specific forest management unit, based on the relative proportion of each under-represented enduring feature it encompasses. Where the probability was low we assigned a lower estimate of protection needed. Hence, our results were reasonably conservative. Nonetheless, they appeared to hold up when checked against the firsthand knowledge of our regional Endangered Spaces coordinators and therefore may provide a helpful background reference for national and regional land and resource-planning processes. Overall, a descriptive gap analysis only takes us halfway in identifying what’s needed to complete the PAS. What’s needed to effectively close the gaps is a complementary identification of sites with high conservation value which could become candidate reserves. As noted above, for strategic reasons, WWF chose not to propose candidate reserves for the entire country. However, during the latter stages of the campaign we did develop a more prescriptive conservation values analysis for this purpose and put it to the test in the course of recent land-use planning decisions for the commercial forests of Ontario, which has a planning area of 45 million hectares. The process consisted of analysing primary ecological themes to derive a conservation score, then modifying the score with additional ecological themes. In the Ontario case, WWF gained access to data enabling a region-wide analysis of intact habitat measured as the distance from the nearest road, late successional forest, wetlands and physical habitat heterogeneity. The variation within each ecological theme was scaled and ranked according to conservation value, then the scores were added across all themes to portray their collective variation across the region. The second step was to add or subtract several other secondary but important landscape values from the primary theme scores. These modifiers included the level of ecological representation by protected areas, the occurrence of species at risk, previously logged areas and the proportion of old growth red and white pine (which have declined throughout the province) (Iacobelli, 1999). The resulting ‘smudge’ map displayed a seamless image of varying degrees of conservation interest across the landscape based on the underlying themes. We were then able to use GIS techniques in a workshop setting to identify the most highly valued areas within each natural region and design potential core representative areas with input from other land-use planning participants regarding their particular interests and concerns. This was a highly successful process.
Progressing in the Real World As the Endangered Spaces Campaign comes to an end, how far has Canada actually progressed on the ground? What difference has our investment in conservation science actually made in terms of forest conservation results?
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Since 1989, more than 1,000 new protected areas have been designated across the country, bringing the total area of Canada protected to campaign standards up to 6.4%, still well short of our 12% national guideline. For the forested regions of Canada, the overall proportion is somewhat higher at 8.2% but still less than the 10% target set by the WWF network through the global Forests for Life Campaign. While important, these numbers do not tell the real story. Representation is what really counts. As shown in Map 1, this 8.2% protection achievement, only resulted in 32 of Canada’s 388 forested natural regions being judged to be adequately represented with protected areas as of 1999. Another 75 were moderately represented, 122 were partially represented and the remaining 159 were unrepresented, meaning they had no protected areas greater than 200 hectares. By this measure, Canada has advanced halfway at best, toward its year 2000 forest protection goal. In fact, a quick inhouse WWF analysis of 35 adequately represented natural regions revealed that between 17% and 70% of the area of the natural region was required for them to attain this status. So there is certainly a long way to go and our initial 12% guideline was, as we knew, only a stepping stone to the goal of representation. Performance has varied greatly from across Canada with jurisdictions such as Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba making significant headway, while others, including New Brunswick, Northwest Territories and Newfoundland have barely begun to do the job. No jurisdiction has fulfilled its commitment. For those reserves we “count” toward the goal of representation, we can only generalize regarding their management effectiveness because we have little data with which to assess the actual condition and threats facing each one. However, the fact that they enjoy long-term protection and do not allow industrial development is a major step in the right direction. What will become increasingly important over time is the management regime applied to the matrix within which these reserves are embedded; in other words, the stewardship of adjacent forest lands. Of course, that issue takes us into the other realm of WWF’s Forests For Life Campaign—forest certification. While we can only claim partial success thus far on the ground, there is little doubt that the Endangered Spaces Campaign, including our science-based measurement of progress, has effectively shaped the protected areas agenda in Canada for years to come. When we began in 1989, only a handful of jurisdictions had actually classified their natural regions. Only one or two had actually set protected areas targets within this framework and none had committed to timetables for achieving them. Now they have done so. Although the forest sector has yet to adopt a standard way of measuring progress on its own protected areas commitment in the National Forest Strategy, WWF’s gap analysis is widely accepted as an authoritative reference (Blue Ribbon Panel, 1997) and a preliminary effort has been made to adapt it for application to forests (Petersen, Petersen and Pollard, 1995). In greatly expanding our nationwide protected areas systems during the past decade, Canada has shown that it can be a world leader in forest conservation. The question, now framed more clearly than ever, is will we be? Will we continue to mark steady progress toward the goal of completing an ecologically representative and effective PAS? Learning for the future What have we learned from the Endangered Spaces Campaign to guide our efforts to ensure a positive answer to the question above? Fundamentally, we’ve shown that progress results from a combination of clear measurable goals, applied conservation biology and pragmatic negotiation, backed by broad public support. None of these alone is sufficient. These strategies came together most effectively in the forests of Ontario during 1999 when 378 new reserves totalling 2.4 million hectares were designated with industry and government support through the Ontario Forest Accord. Driven by the Ontario premier’s official commitment to the Endangered Spaces goal and favourable pre-election conditions, WWF’s gap analysis and conservation values analysis played a crucial role in our successful negotiations with a market-sensitive forest industry, leading to this single largest expansion of a PAS in Canadian history.
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We cannot be certain that our coarse-filter gap analysis always led us to the best reserves in this or other real-world applications during the past decade. Additional data regarding wildlife populations, land cover and habitat condition, historical disturbance patterns (both natural and human-caused), as well as elevation gradients and headwater areas, would undoubtedly have improved our assessments and will do so in future. This information also needs to be complemented with the traditional ecological knowledge of Aboriginal peoples wherever possible. However, the data we did have enabled us to develop technically defensible proposals for new protected areas and to choose objectively among various options when negotiating with other parties in land and resource planning. Ultimately, our methodology and data enabled us to define a “finishable” protected areas agenda, a replicable way of confirming when representation has been achieved in a particular natural region and, ultimately, for a whole jurisdiction. This significantly increased the level of certainty about land-use decisions, a key factor for resource industries. In short, we have been able to move from the traditional environmentalist position of saying “no”, to one of saying “yes”, and thereby gain ground in the face of rapidly declining opportunities to protect intact forests. At the same time our “enduring features” based gap analysis should also serve us well in future protected areas planning for disturbed natural regions where the conservation agenda will be increasingly focused on restoration rather than retention. This is because physical features generally survive in the face of human-caused habitat disturbance, including climate change, so that we will always be able to locate reserves on a sound basis to ensure long-term protection and recovery of the full range of potential biological conditions. That said, the Endangered Spaces Campaign has served its purpose as a vehicle for advancing protected areas. Our too-thin effort, intended to operate uniformly across the entire country, and focused exclusively on core representative protected areas, needs to give way to a more flexible program model. We need to connect and buffer the core reserves to complete a functioning ecological network at a bioregional scale. Local and regional ‘ownership’ of the new protected areas needs to be nourished through ongoing involvement with the social and economic needs of communities. This means that scarce conservation resources and effort need to be focused more intensely and comprehensively in a few large regions. At the same time, given the impact of globalization, especially in a trading nation such as Canada, this regionally focused effort needs to address and harness market forces that powerfully shape the destiny of local communities. In the increasingly commercially licensed forests of Canada, the real barrier to rapid completion of the PAS is not scientific but economic. Timber harvest levels are typically set in advance of proper landuse planning, and are based instead on meeting the demand of manufacturing facilities that, in turn, support jobs and communities that are often in decline. This desperate reality reveals just how trapped we have become in a short-term dependence on exploiting nature. Unchallenged, it leads public discourse to focus on how bad things will be if we don’t continue running down our natural assets rather than on what the costs will be if we do and how good it could be for us to change course. In the professional world, it leads to soothing notions of ecosystem management and proposals for “floating” nature reserves that move about the landscape whenever we need to get at the resource they are (temporarily) protecting. Market pressure, in the form of worldwide consumer demand for forest conservation, is becoming a powerful force for change to this often politically entrenched situation, as we are currently seeing in the coastal forests of British Columbia. There, logging companies appear ready to suspend operations for a time so that a lasting land-use solution can be fashioned. In addition, the global consolidation of the forest industry that is underway also provides opportunities for redrawing land and resource allocation. For example, over a roughly 15-year period, the area protected in a large commercial forest in Ontario grew from 3% to 36% through successive ownership changes, where each successive company claimed that further protection would have dire consequences for its economic viability. Nonetheless, a profitable business is still in place there today. While market forces are increasingly driving improved environmental performance, it remains that government, as landlord of our vast forest estate, needs to facilitate and decide on an orderly transition by both incremental (e.g. forest licence renewal conditions) and comprehensive (e.g. regional land and resource) planning. Ultimately, the vice grip of industrial demand must be relaxed by changes in government decision making so that timber harvest levels are set at the end of forest land planning as
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an output, rather than at the beginning as an input, constraining all other forest values. Where leadership to begin addressing this issue has been demonstrated at the very centre of government, i.e. by the premier, major system-wide expansions in protected areas have occurred. Where it hasn’t, progress in designating new protected areas has been halting at best. In future, the rights and aspirations of aboriginal people will justifiably play a much larger role in land and resource allocation and management. This reality has both positive and negative consequences for securing new protected areas. Many of the largest new protected areas secured during the Endangered Spaces Campaign were driven by land claim settlements or other measures to advance the rights of First Nations. On the other hand, new parks and other protected areas have also been opposed as violating treaty rights or other entitlements like proper consultation. As the need for economic survival gains political force within a rapidly growing aboriginal population, it is clear that conservationists and resource developers alike will need the support and partnership of First Nations to successfully advance their agendas. Hopefully, addressing the long-term survival of aboriginal and other rural communities will help bring about a more durable way of using and living in the forest. The Endangered Spaces Campaign has been premised on the simple, heartfelt support of Canadians for protecting our wilderness heritage. It turns out that to actually do so, and achieve the campaign goal, poses a far more fundamental challenge for our society; namely that we actually make significant changes to the way we do business on the land. When it was endorsed as public policy for Canada in 1992, the Endangered Spaces goal became far more than a WWF campaign target. In reality, it became a practical litmus test for Canada’s global leadership on the theoretical path to the future called “sustainable development”. We have still to pass the test.
References Blue Ribbon Panel. (1997) National Forest Stategy, “Sustainable Forests: A Canadian Commitment.” Final Evaluation Report. National Forest Strategy Coalition. Ottawa, Ontario. 254pp. Global Forest Watch Canada. (2000) Canada’s Forests at a Crossroads: An Assessment in the Year 2000. A Global Forest Watch Canada Report. Victoria, British Columbia. 114 pp. Iacobelli, A. (1999) Spatial Analysis of Biodiversity Information: Summary of Efforts by World Wildlife Fund Canada. Draft Working Document Prepared for the National Biodiversity Information Initiative, December 1998. Revised August 1999. 13pp. Kavanagh, K. and T. Iacobelli. (1995) A Protected Areas Gap Analysis Methodology: Planning for the Conservation of Biodiversity. World Wildlife Fund Canada Discussion Paper. Toronto, Ontario. 68pp. Noss, R. (1995) Maintaining Ecological Integrity in Representative Networks. World Wildlife Fund Canada/World Wildlife Fund United States Discussion Paper. Toronto, Ontario. 77pp. Petersen, E.B., N.M. Petersen and D.F.W. Pollard. (1995) Some principles and criteria to make Canada’s protected areas systems representative of the nation’s forest diversity. For. Chron. 71:497507. The State of Canada’s Forests: the people’s forests 1997-1998. (1998) NRCan, CFS, HQ, Policy, Planning and International Affairs Branch, Ottawa, Ontario. Annu. Rep. 108pp. WWF (1999) Canada’s Commitment to Forest Protected Areas: A WWF status report. A WWF Forests for Life Campaign Report. Godalming, Surrey. 17pp.
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Protected Area System Planning in Lao P.D.R. Klaus Berkmuller
Abstract A systematic survey of candidate areas for a national protected area system began in 1989 and ended in 1995. Proposals resulting from the surveys led to the declaration of 18 National Biodiversity Conservation Areas, raising national level protected area coverage from nil to 12 per cent. The selection of areas was based on considerations of vegetation cover and condition, land use and presence of key wildlife species. Coverage was assessed for contribution to biogeographic sub-unit, major forest type, and altitude zones. The relative importance of individual areas was linked to the level of respective coverage achieved. The plan served to place protected areas into the policy arena and it triggered a healthy debate of hydropower issues, but its effectiveness in guiding post-declaration management was limited.
Klaus Berkmuller IUCN, S & SE Asia Regional Office P.O. Box 4 Klong Luang Pathumthani 12120 THAILAND email:
[email protected]
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Protected Area System Planning in Lao P.D.R. Klaus Berkmuller Introduction The Indochina conflict brought political and social upheaval also to Laos, now officially known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao P.D.R.). The years following the revolution of 1975 saw the establishment of a socialist economy financed partly by logging. However, economic development was slow and, in 1986, the Fourth Party Congress adopted the ‘New Economic Mechanism’ allowing private ownership and encouraging foreign investment. Efforts to introduce forest conservation coincided with accelerated economic growth at a rate of 6-7% per annum through the early and mid-nineties until the regional downturn in 1997. Hydropower development for sale of electricity to neighbouring countries was a central part of development planning by government but was not coordinated with forest conservation. In 1988, the ‘Lao-Swedish Forestry Cooperation Program’, previously supporting mainly forest inventory and management focused on timber production, added a ‘Forest Conservation Sub-Program’ (FCP) in order to ‘evaluate on a broad scale the status and distribution of forest and wildlife resources in the Lao P.D.R., and to determine priority conservation needs’ (SIDA,1988). The FCP began by reviewing the information available for areas that had been suggested as deserving protected area status. Among these were 23 national forest reserves dating back to as early as 1937. Little documentation was available and there were no records of any area having any form of conservation management. In May 1989, FCP presented its approach (Salter and Phanthavong, 1989).
Fig. 1: Biogeographic
The Approach sub-units relevant for Laos The aim was to evaluate the options for ensuring proportional representation of the major forest types and altitude zones within the Lao portion of each relevant biogeographic subunit of the Indochinese subregion of the Indo-Malayan Realm. A target of between 5% and 20% of the original extent of each forest type in each sub-unit was considered feasible. The delineation of sub-units and distribution and area of original forest types was taken from the Review of the protected areas system of the Indo-Malayan Realm (MacKinnon and MacKinnon, 1986). The sub-units in question comprised Central Indochina tropical lowland plains (10a), Northern Indochina hilly, sub-tropical sector (10b), and the Annam Trung Son mountain chain (5b). 10 b
5b
10 a
5b
10 a
The importance of wetlands was recognized but the investigations concentrated on large forest areas. It was assumed that, to a considerable extent, wetlands would be included by default. The review began with a desk assessment and was followed by field surveys. For each candidate area, current land use and vegetation cover, and altitude classes were determined from available maps. The assessment of land use and vegetation cover 238
initially had to rely on the information contained in a 1:1,000,000 scale land-use map current to 1981. After completion of a National Forest Inventory in 1992 (Manivong and Sandewall, 1992), the forest type coverage assessment followed. The number of cover classes was reduced to five (dry evergreen, mixed deciduous, dry dipterocarp, coniferous and mixed coniferous/broadleaf forest, and other natural cover). Land-use maps at scale 1:50,000 based on interpretation of SPOT satellite imagery dated 1989 to 1991 allowed a more up-to-date evaluation of land use, forest cover, and forest condition in terms of density and stem size. Field surveys provided additional information from both direct observations and discussions with local people and officials on: •
options and ease of access
•
presence of enclave villages
•
current and/or past logging
•
forest condition along the travelled routes
•
approximate location of mature forest away from the travelled routes
•
approximate location of preferred areas for hunting
•
presence or absence of key-wildlife species
•
livestock predation by large predators
•
types of current land use
•
approximation of boundaries, likely extensions, new areas.
Based on a semi-objective assessment of the information gathered, a decision was made as to whether the area in question deserved to be proposed for national protected area status. Areas were rejected because of deficiencies in habitat condition (minimum of 75% classified as natural cover type) and/or size (minimum 500km2 ). The status of system planning was published in three reports (Salter and Phanthavong, 1991; Berkmuller et al., 1993; Berkmuller et al., 1995). All Lao protected areas are best classified as resource reserves or multiple use management areas. in order to emphasize their potential as future national parks or nature reserves and to set them apart from ordinary conservation forest, they were called National Biodiversity Conservation Areas (NBCA) in the English language report and translated into Lao as ‘National Forest Reserve’.
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Results s
Fig. 2: Areas under consideration and areas recommended
Protected areas were recommended in batches starting in 1991. By mid1995 the Forest Conservation Subprogram had proposed 28 areas covering 35,370 km2 for National Biodiversity Conservation Area status (Berkmuller et al., 1995).
s
More than half of the original candidate areas had been rejected because they were found deficient in habitat condition or size.
Areas under consideration in 1989 Areas recommended in 1995 (includes declared and undeclared areas) still under consideration
Recommended areas
s
s
s
For the 17 original candidate areas that had been accepted, boundaries were different from those suggested at the
beginning of the review. During the investigations additional areas came under consideration. Eleven new areas were eventually recommended for NBCA status in the 1995 status report. Several locations remained under consideration. Among them, Dong Khanthung was found to have outstanding wildlife conservation value and was recommended in 1998 (Round, 1998). Sorting the wheat from the chaff, even at this broad level, provided the basis for subsequent area declaration. Fig.3: Declared areas
Area declaration The first areas were declared at prime minister level in October 1993. They included all 17 areas recommended in the 1993 status report. Of the eleven additional areas recommended in 1995 (Berkmuller et al., 1995) only one, Xe Sap, has since been declared. In many cases there were discrepancies between the recommended and the declared extent of the area. On average, the declared size is larger than 150 km2 .
declared National Biodiversity Conservation Areas
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Two areas were declared that had not been recommended under the review. One (Phou Phanang) was declared for its political and historical value. The other (Dong Phou Vieng) was elevated from provincial forest reserve to NBCA status to satisfy a target site requirement for the World Bank/GEF conservation component of the Forest Management and Conservation Project (FOMACOP). Coverage by biogeographic sub-unit and altitude Total area coverage for the country in declared NBCAs and within recommended boundaries now stands at 12%. Coverage for the lowland plains (10a) is 14.1% and could still increase. The Annamites (5b) are represented at 22.4% with the possibility of further increases. For the northern highlands (10b) coverage will remain below 10% even when including the newly recommended areas. Coverage increases are probably still feasible if areas smaller than 500 km2 were considered. All altitude categories are represented including low altitudes (< 200 m). Coverage is deemed adequate except for the very high altitude category (> 2,000 m) in sub-unit 10a. Table 1: Coverage* by biogeographic sub-unit subunit
no. of NBCAs
10a (Central Indochina, tropical lowland plains) 10b (Northern Indochina, hilly sub-tropical sector) 5b (Annam Trung Son mountain chain) whole country
10** 4 5 19
area in Lao portion of the sub-unit (km²)
113,365 85,668 34,089 236,800
area within declared reserves (km²)
15,951 5,135 7,628 28,714
14.1% 6.0% 22.4% 12.1%
* Within declared areas and recommended boundaries ** Phou Phanang excluded Sub-unit figures do not add up to country total because 3,678 km2 of the marginal sub-unit 10c are not shown.
Coverage by forest type Coverage of forest types was evaluated relative to original area and current area (Table 2). While original coverage adds a historical perspective, current coverage is more relevant for assessing the practical options. A historic decline of evergreen forest types seems evident from the data. The data also suggest that all remaining evergreen forest is already contained in declared reserves, yet additional evergreen forest is known to exist in as yet undeclared reserves. The National Office of Forest Inventory and Planning (NOFIP) report did acknowledge that dry evergreen forest was underestimated during photo interpretation which would explain at least some of the apparent increase in mixed deciduous forest types. An increase in deciduous forest types may also be due to fire and cutting causing a gradual transformation of former evergreen forest. It seems clear, however, that almost a quarter of the current closed forest is contained in declared protected areas. Coniferous forest types seem comparatively well represented at 15% of the original area. Dry dipterocarp forest is represented at about 7% and 10% of original and current area respectively.
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Table 2: Percentage of original and current area under different forest types NOFIP Classification upper dry evergreen (UDE) lower dry evergreen (LDE) upper mixed deciduous (UMD) lower mixed deciduous (LMD)
percent of Lao PDR land area original NOFIP declared * 1992** NBCAs
equivalent in MacKinnon tropical montane evergreen (TME) sub-montane dry evergreen (SMDE) lowland semi-evergreen (SER) tropical montane deciduous (TMD) forest on limestone (FL) sub-tropical montane (SMF) pine forest (TPF)
68%
4.8%
4.8%
23%
35.1%
4.1%
coniferous, mixed 2.0% 1.7% 0.3% coniferous/broadleaf (S, MS) dry dipterocarp (DD) dry dipterocarp (DDF) 7.0% 5.1% 0.5% sources: * original forest cover figures taken from Salter and Phanthavong (1989) based on MacKinnon and MacKinnon (1986) ** adapted from tables 5.3, 9.7 in Manivong and Sandewall 1992, National Office of Forest Inventory and Planning (NOFIP) note: Forest on limestone is probably also contained within NOFIP classification of rock (R) and heath, stunted, and scrub forest (SR).
The national inventory did not contain data on forest cover by biogeographic sub-unit. Coverage could only be estimated relative to original forest type coverage (Table 3). Of immediate concern is the total absence of coniferous forest types in the northern highlands and low coverage of evergreen forest. Table 3: Coverage* by forest type and biogeographic sub-unit percent of original area of forest types contained in declared NBCAs E MD DD C/BC
sub-unit
10a (Central Indochina, tropical lowland plains)** 10b (Northern Indochina, hilly sub-tropical sector) 5b (Annam Trung Son mountain chain) *within declared areas and recommended boundaries ** Phou Phanang excluded
7.5% 1.8% 16.3%
31.5% 10.9% 30.2%
7.0% n.a. n.a.
n.a. 0% 10.1%
E = dry (semi-) evergreen MD= mixed deciduous DD=dry dipterocarp C/BC=coniferous and mixed broadleaf/coniferous
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Contribution of individual reserves to dense and mature forest cover Areas vary greatly in their contribution to extent and quality of forest cover (Table 4). Under the assumption that undisturbed forest generally has a higher conservation value than disturbed forest it makes sense to evaluate areas according to the extent of undisturbed forest they contain. For evergreen and mixed deciduous forest types, the degree of disturbance can be inferred from crown density and maturity. Undisturbed forest was taken to largely coincide with NOFIP density class 3 (> 70% crown cover) and stand structure classes 3 (40-60 cm dbh) or 4 (>60cm dbh). In the great majority of NBCAs, dry evergreen forest or mixed deciduous forest types are dominant. A low percentage (
