Safety net: protected areas and poverty reduction

Abstract

Today protected areas are increasingly expected to deliver social and economic benefits in addition to conserving biodiversity. Assurances that protected areas will provide such benefits are often crucial to attracting the support needed for their creation. But delivering on these promises is seldom easy. In some cases this may mean broadening the scope of benefits delivered by protected areas without undermining what they were set up for in the first place, no simple task. Unless we understand and publicise the full range of benefits from protected areas we risk not only reducing the chances of new protected areas being created but even of seeing some existing protected areas being degazetted and their values lost.