0000000001332056
AUTHOR
Lauren Coad
The role of Management Effectiveness assessments in understanding the performance of protected areas
Setting aside land for the protection of nature is a key global strategy for halting the current loss of biodiversity. However, the extent to which PAs are safeguarding biodiversity is debated, and there is an increasing understanding that setting aside land for protection is not enough to safeguard biodiversity. Importantly, we also need to understand if and how existing protected areas are maintaining biodiversity and reducing threats as well as understand what management systems, and interventions make protected areas most effective. Protected Area Management Effectiveness (PAME) tools is one of the most widely used methods for assessing the adequacy of management actions and resources a…
Protected area effectiveness and management indicators do not correlate: what are we doing wrong?
Protected areas are one of the key tools for conserving biodiversity and recent studies have highlighted the impact they can have in avoiding habitat conversion, finding that protected areas in general are effective, yet that this varies with governance regimes (Schleicher et al. 2017) and over time (Eklund et al. 2016). However, the relationship to management actions on the ground is far less studied (Coad et al. 2015) and we currently do not know which management actions are crucial for success. To investigate this in a challenging socio-ecological environment, we studied the effectiveness of the protected area network of Madagascar; a country with high deforestation rates and an unstable…