As parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, most of the world's governments have recognised the need to conserve natural resources for the benefit of present and future generations. Protected areas remain the strongest tool for managers interested in conserving biodiversity. Such programmes inevitably favour some individuals or groups of people more than others, and the rural poor have tended to be among those who are most strongly disadvantaged. In this, protected areas are no different from other resource-management approaches designed by central governments, including timber concessions, mining, dam construction, infrastructure development, and so forth. However, for developing countries, linking protected areas to poverty reduction enables a more convincing case to be made for greater investment in protecting the natural assets that can benefit both the rural poor and wider society. Further, protected areas leave more future options available than do more intensive changes of land use.
A sincere effort by governments to reduce poverty will require fundamental changes in many government sectors. Protected areas can only contribute to poverty reduction, for example through the methods suggested in this paper, within the framework of such a broad sectoral reform. They must play a more significant role in addressing the needs of the rural poor by adopting socially responsible management approaches and by being fully integrated into national and international sustainable development and poverty reduction strategies. This said, protected areas exist primarily to maintain biological diversity, and maintenance of biological diversity is recognised in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG7) as an indicator of progress in reducing poverty. Protected areas by themselves will not generate the broad development benefits required to reduce poverty and should not be expected to. They will contribute by ensuring that the natural systems necessary for development are available and functioning for current and future generations.
The new generation of protected area professionals needs to work with colleagues from other professions who are together fully supportive of the needs to link protected areas more productively with social-economic development, accepting the challenge to provide leadership to achieve sustainable development across the landscape and in the hearts and minds of human society.
Protected areas often contain wild relatives of domesticated species. This is a wild jungle fowl in Thailand, which can be crossbred with domestic varieties to enhance desirable qualities. This another underappreciated benefit of protected areas.
Photo: ©J. A. McNeely