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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.

This is the seventh volume in a WWF series of reports developed as part of the Arguments for Protection project, which aims to identify and where possible quantify the range of benefits derived from protected areas, increase support for protection, develop new interdisciplinary partnerships, identify innovative financing mechanisms and broaden and strengthen protected area management strategies. In this case we focus on the positive benefits that can be provided by protected areas for human health. Our understanding of the term ‘human health’ in this context is based on the definition of the World Health Organization (WHO): “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

Plant genetic resources are a threatened but invaluable resource for present and future generations. Crop genetic diversity – both in cultivated plants (landraces) and the wild plants from which our crops originate (crop wild relatives or CWR) – provide important resources for food security, environmental sustainability and economic stability. It is thus perhaps surprising, considering this socio-economic importance that the conservation of CWR has not been systematically addressed and the rapid declines in landraces have generated little international conservation concern.

Leonard Usongo knows he has sacred sites inside his protected area, but they are so sacred that he is not allowed to learn where they are. The Baka (pygmy) people, who live in the forests of Lobeké National Park in southeast Cameroon, follow a complex faith system that includes the adoption of a personal god in adolescence and the veneration of particular sites – groves and trees – within the forest that are believed to be of high spiritual value. Dr. Usongo, Chief Technical Advisor for WWF’s capacity-building programme in Lobeké, spends months of the year in a tented encampment in the park and has many friends among the Baka, working with them on a day to day basis, but it is against their beliefs to allow anyone else to enter a sacred area. Reliant on the Baka for guidance in the dense forests when he is carrying out biological surveys, Leonard has learned over time roughly where the sacred sites are because they are the places he never reaches, however often he asks to be led there…but he also knows that these places are safe for wildlife, being meticulously protected by the Baka1.