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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”.