Setting priorities for conservation : protected area effectiveness, management, and quality of governance
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Protected areas are a key tool for conserving biodiversity and an increase in their coverage has long been the aim of international conventions and initiatives. With progress to achieve target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity of protecting 17 % of terrestrial areas, the focus has now shifted towards assessing the protected area effectiveness in maintaining species or avoiding land conversions. In my doctoral thesis I develop a novel way of assessing PA effectiveness, based on the counterfactual thinking, and use this to link it to different management and ecological factors. I link different aspects of PA effectiveness conceptually to the quality of governance and show how spatial prioritizations can change with the inclusion of these socio-political factors. Using Madagascar as a case study, and in line with other studies elsewhere, I find that the protected area network is effective to some extent in mitigating the pressure of deforestation. I show the importance of considering the temporal dimension of protected area effectiveness measures and how protected area effectiveness changes over time due to increasing or decreasing pressures. These results link directly to considerations of vulnerability and irreplaceability in Systematic conservation planning and I show that accounting for governance factors in a global spatial prioritization analysis change the identification of areas. My thesis shows the relative nature of protected area effectiveness measures and how important it is to get the assessments right, especially because of the massive focus on protected area effectiveness as a panacea to stopping biodiversity declines. Improving protected area effectiveness needs to be linked to governance factors affecting not only the management but also the drivers of threat, something that previous studies have overlooked. With my thesis I make an attempt to bridge the themes of protected area effectiveness, considerations of quality of governance, and how it all links to conservation prioritizations. Our methodology has been developed with the aim to be computationally efficient and conceptually more robust than existing matching methods, with the potential to be scaled up for larger studies. However, how the two methods perform needs to be tested in the future. My dissertation has clear practical implications for the conservation of Madagascar s biodiversity and the results are of potential interest for both NGOs and the Madagascar National Park administration. The conceptual contribution of this thesis should be incorporated into mainstream thinking and the discourse of setting global priorities for biodiversity conservation, such as by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the World Parks Congress (WPC) and ultimately the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Johanna Eklund
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2337690996