Protected Areas, Development, and Land Use in the Tropics

AbstractForest loss and degradation in the tropics contribute 6–17% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Protected areas cover 217.2 million ha (19.6%) of the world’s humid tropical forests and contain c. 70.3 petagrams of carbon (Pg C) in biomass and soil to 1 m depth. Between 2000 and 2005, we estimate that 1.75 million ha of forest were lost from protected areas in humid tropical forests, causing the emission of 0.25–0.33 Pg C. Protected areas lost about half as much carbon as the same area of unprotected forest. We estimate that the reduction of these carbon emissions from ongoing deforestation in protected sites in humid tropical forests could be valued at USD 6,200–7,400 million depending on the land use after clearance. This is > 1.5 times the estimated spending on protected area management in these regions. Improving management of protected areas to retain forest cover better may be an important, although certainly not sufficient, component of an overall strategy for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

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Effectiveness of Protected Areas in the Pan-Tropics and International Aid for Conservation

Geomatics ◽

10.3390/geomatics1030019 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (3) ◽

pp. 335-346

Author(s):

Do-Hyung Kim ◽

Anupam Anand

Keyword(s):

Protected Areas ◽

Forest Conservation ◽

Forest Cover ◽

International Aid ◽

Asian Countries ◽

Forest Cover Change ◽

Average Effect ◽

Tropical Countries ◽

Conservation Policies ◽

The Tropics

Evaluation of the effectiveness of protected areas is critical for forest conservation policies and priorities. We used 30 m resolution forest cover change data from 1990 to 2010 for ~4000 protected areas to evaluate their effectiveness. Our results show that protected areas in the tropics avoided 83,500 ± 21,200 km2 of deforestation during the 2000s. Brazil’s protected areas have the largest amount of avoided deforestation at 50,000 km2. We also show the amount of international aid received by tropical countries compared to the effectiveness of protected areas. Thirty-four tropical countries received USD 42 billion during the 1990s and USD 62 billion during the 2000s in international aid for biodiversity conservation. The effectiveness of international aid was highest in Latin America, with 4.3 m2/USD, led by Brazil, while tropical Asian countries showed the lowest average effect of international aid, reaching only 0.17 m2/USD.

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Analytical Solutions to Trade-Offs between Size of Protected Areas and Land-Use Intensity

Conservation Biology ◽

10.1111/j.1523-1739.2012.01887.x ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 26 (5) ◽

pp. 883-893 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

VAN BUTSIC ◽

VOLKER C. RADELOFF ◽

TOBIAS KUEMMERLE ◽

ANNA M. PIDGEON

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Protected Areas ◽

Analytical Solutions ◽

Land Use Intensity ◽

Trade Offs

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Bewirtschaftung von tropischen Sekundärwäldern

Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie ◽

10.1515/zfw.2002.0005 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Dietrich Schmidt-Vogt

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Forest Cover ◽

Stand Structure ◽

Secondary Forest ◽

Secondary Forests ◽

Tropical Asia ◽

Land Use Systems ◽

The Future ◽

The Tropics ◽

Primary Forests

AbstractManagement of secondary tropical forests: a new perspective for sustainable use of forests in Asia. The decline of primary forests in the tropics is leading to a reassessment of the role secondary forests might play within the context of tropical forest management. Recent research has shown that secondary forests in the tropics can be both rich in species and complex in terms of stand structure. There is, moreover, a growing recognition of the importance of secondary forests for traditional subsistence economies in the tropics and of their economic potential for land use systems in the future. Management of secondary forests in Asia as an alternative to the extraction of timber from primary forests but also as one among other options to intensify traditional land use systems has a potential for the future especially because of the existence of vast tracts of valuable secondary forest cover, and because of the store of traditional knowledge that can still be found in tropical Asia.

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Hotspots of gross emissions from the land use sector: patterns, uncertainties, and leading emission sources for the period 2000–2005 in the tropics

Biogeosciences ◽

10.5194/bg-13-4253-2016 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 13 (14) ◽

pp. 4253-4269 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Rosa Maria Roman-Cuesta ◽

Mariana C. Rufino ◽

Martin Herold ◽

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl ◽

Todd S. Rosenstock ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

National Policy ◽

Ghg Emissions ◽

Emission Sources ◽

Intergovernmental Panel ◽

Wood Harvesting ◽

Global Mean Temperature ◽

Agricultural Emissions ◽

Mitigation Action ◽

The Tropics

Abstract. According to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), emissions must be cut by 41–72 % below 2010 levels by 2050 for a likely chance of containing the global mean temperature increase to 2 °C. The AFOLU sector (Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use) contributes roughly a quarter ( ∼  10–12 Pg CO2e yr−1) of the net anthropogenic GHG emissions mainly from deforestation, fire, wood harvesting, and agricultural emissions including croplands, paddy rice, and livestock. In spite of the importance of this sector, it is unclear where the regions with hotspots of AFOLU emissions are and how uncertain these emissions are. Here we present a novel, spatially comparable dataset containing annual mean estimates of gross AFOLU emissions (CO2, CH4, N2O), associated uncertainties, and leading emission sources, in a spatially disaggregated manner (0.5°) for the tropics for the period 2000–2005. Our data highlight the following: (i) the existence of AFOLU emissions hotspots on all continents, with particular importance of evergreen rainforest deforestation in Central and South America, fire in dry forests in Africa, and both peatland emissions and agriculture in Asia; (ii) a predominant contribution of forests and CO2 to the total AFOLU emissions (69 %) and to their uncertainties (98 %); (iii) higher gross fluxes from forests, which coincide with higher uncertainties, making agricultural hotspots appealing for effective mitigation action; and (iv) a lower contribution of non-CO2 agricultural emissions to the total gross emissions (ca. 25 %), with livestock (15.5 %) and rice (7 %) leading the emissions. Gross AFOLU tropical emissions of 8.0 (5.5–12.2) were in the range of other databases (8.4 and 8.0 Pg CO2e yr−1 in FAOSTAT and the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) respectively), but we offer a spatially detailed benchmark for monitoring progress in reducing emissions from the land sector in the tropics. The location of the AFOLU hotspots of emissions and data on their associated uncertainties will assist national policy makers, investors, and other decision-makers who seek to understand the mitigation potential of the AFOLU sector.

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Integrated Landscape Change Analysis of Protected Areas and their Surrounding Landscapes: Application in the Brazilian Cerrado

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs12091413 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (9) ◽

pp. 1413 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Beatriz Bellón ◽

Julien Blanco ◽

Alta De Vos ◽

Fabio de O. Roque ◽

Olivier Pays ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Protected Areas ◽

Landscape Change ◽

Vegetation Index ◽

Productivity Loss ◽

Landscape Dynamics ◽

Natural Vegetation ◽

Local Analysis ◽

Area Network ◽

Conservation Areas

Remote sensing tools have been long used to monitor landscape dynamics inside and around protected areas. Hereto, scientists have largely relied on land use and land cover (LULC) data to derive indicators for monitoring these dynamics, but these metrics do not capture changes in the state of vegetation surfaces that may compromise the ecological integrity of conservation areas’ landscapes. Here, we introduce a methodology that combines LULC change estimates with three Normalized Difference Vegetation Index-based proxy indicators of vegetation productivity, phenology, and structural change. We illustrate the utility of this methodology through a regional and local analysis of the landscape dynamics in the Cerrado Biome in Brazil in 2001 and 2016. Despite relatively little natural vegetation loss inside core protected areas and their legal buffer zones, the different indicators revealed significant LULC conversions from natural vegetation to farming land, general productivity loss, homogenization of natural forests, significant agricultural expansion, and a general increase in productivity. These results suggest an overall degradation of habitats and intensification of land use in the studied conservation area network, highlighting serious conservation inefficiencies in this region and stressing the importance of integrated landscape change analyses to provide complementary indicators of ecologically-relevant dynamics in these key conservation areas.

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The Local Biophysical Response to Land-Use Change in HadGEM2-ES

Journal of Climate ◽

10.1175/jcli-d-18-0738.1 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 32 (22) ◽

pp. 7611-7627 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

E. Robertson

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Land Use Change ◽

Latent Heat ◽

Temperature Response ◽

Bowen Ratio ◽

Heat Fluxes ◽

Turbulent Heat ◽

Available Energy ◽

Turbulent Heat Fluxes ◽

The Tropics

Abstract The biophysical response to a local change in land use is calculated using the HadGEM2-ES Earth system model. The biophysical temperature response is found to be a small residual of three large opposing flux responses: available energy, sensible heat, and latent heat. Deforestation reduces available energy, which is balanced by a reduction in heat lost via turbulent fluxes. However, the changes in turbulent heat fluxes are not simply a response to the reduction in available energy; rather, they are a direct response to land-use change, caused by reduced roughness length and, in the tropics, an increase in the Bowen ratio. Evaluation against satellite-derived observational datasets shows that in response to deforestation, the model has too much albedo-driven cooling and too little latent-heat-driven warming, leading to a large cooling bias.

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Future climate and land use instability can negate the benefits of protected areas

10.21203/rs.3.rs-270966/v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ernest Asamoah ◽

Linda Beaumont ◽

Joesph M Maina

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Land Use Change ◽

Protected Areas ◽

Multiple Scales ◽

Future Climate ◽

Spatially Adaptive ◽

Climate Stress ◽

Potential Benefits ◽

High Conservation ◽

Climate Velocity

Abstract Expanding protected area networks and enhancing their capacities is currently one avenue at the forefront of efforts to conserve and restore global biodiversity. Climate and habitat loss resulting from land use interact synergistically to undermine the potential benefits of protected areas (PAs). Targeting conservation, adaptation and mitigation efforts requires an understanding of patterns of climate and land-use change within the current arrangement of PAs, and how these might change in the future. In this paper, we provide this understanding using predicted rates of temporal and spatial displacement of future climate and land use globally and within PAs. We show that ~ 47% of the world’s PAs—10.6% of which are under restrictive management—are located in regions that will likely experience both climate stress and land-use instability by 2050. The vast majority of these PAs are also distributed across moist biomes and in high conservation value regions, and fall into less-restrictive management categories. The differential impacts of combined land use and climate velocity across protected biomes indicate that climate and land-use change may have fundamentally different ecological and management consequences at multiple scales. Taken together, our findings can inform spatially adaptive natural resource management and actions to achieve sustainable development and biodiversity goals.

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Spatial Planning as a Tool for Effective Nature Conservation: A Conceptual Framework for Turkey’s Spatial Planning System

Journal of Landscape Ecology ◽

10.2478/jlecol-2018-0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 73-98

Author(s):

Esra Yazici Gökmen ◽

Nuran Zeren Gülersoy

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Nature Conservation ◽

Literature Review ◽

Conceptual Framework ◽

Protected Areas ◽

Conservation Planning ◽

Spatial Planning ◽

Land Use Changes ◽

Planning System ◽

Effective Planning

Abstract Protected areas can be parts of larger ecosystems, and land use changes in the unprotected part of the ecosystems may threaten the biological diversity by affecting the ecological processes. The relationship between protected areas and their surroundings has been influential in understanding the role of spatial planning in nature conservation. This article focuses on the problem that Turkey’s protected areas are vulnerable to pressure and threats caused by land use changes. Spatial planning serving as a bridge between nature conservation and land use is the solution for effective nature conservation in Turkey. Thereby, the aim of this article is to develop a conceptual framework which offers spatial planning as an effective tool to bridge the gap between land use change and nature conservation. In this context, first literature review is conducted, and systematic conservation planning, evidence-based conservation planning, bioregional planning and national system planning are presented as effective planning methods in nature conservation. In addition to literature review, official national statistics and Convention on Biological Diversity’s country reports are utilized to shed light on Turkey’s current state. Finally, a conceptual framework is defined, the main differences with the current situation are revealed. The results indicate that an effective planning system for Turkey’s protected areas incorporates a holistic, target-oriented system defining the spatial planning process for protected areas. The spatial planning system to be developed in this context is also used by decision-makers in evaluating the ecological effectiveness of existing plans.

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