Tag Archives: protected areas

Two recent reports guide orienteering in the jungle of protected areas

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On Monday, The European Environment Agency published an overview of European protected areas, which at the moment cover one fifth of the EEA member countries’ territory. At a first glance, the report seems to provide a very useful reference manual about how different national and European schemes come together to form a network of areas subject to various policy and management schemes.

Protected Areas in Europe couples nicely with Protected Planet Report 2012, which was published by the IUCN and UNEP-WCMC in September. Protected Planet Report goes into measuring progress towards the UN Convention on Biological Diversity targets at a global level.                     Continue reading →

Porter-Bolland et al. 2011. Community managed forests and forest protected areas: An assessment of their conservation effectiveness across the tropics.

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This week we discussed a very interesting meta-analysis of deforestation in protected areas versus community managed forests. The authors found that deforestation rates were lower in community managed areas compared to protected areas and also that the variation was smaller in community managed forests. We discussed the generality of these results and also how representative the sample can be considered since most of the case studies came from Latin America (11/16) and only a few from Africa or Asia. This might be of relevance since the threats and pressures are different in different regions. Continue reading →