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• Published: 29 July 2020

Conserving Africa’s wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond

• Peter Lindsey   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9197-2897 1 , 2 , 3 ,
• James Allan 4 ,
• Peadar Brehony   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1315-7683 5 ,
• Amy Dickman 6 ,
• Ashley Robson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6433-0602 7 ,
• Colleen Begg 8 ,
• Hasita Bhammar 9 ,
• Lisa Blanken 10 ,
• Thomas Breuer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8387-5712 11 ,
• Kathleen Fitzgerald 12 ,
• Michael Flyman 13 ,
• Patience Gandiwa 14 ,
• Nicia Giva 15 ,
• Dickson Kaelo 16 ,
• Simon Nampindo 17 ,
• Nyambe Nyambe   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1275-0178 18 ,
• Kurt Steiner   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4686-0375 19 ,
• Andrew Parker 20 ,
• Dilys Roe   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6547-6427 21 , 22 ,
• Paul Thomson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9566-3293 3 ,
• Morgan Trimble   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9914-0788 23 ,
• Alexandre Caron   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5213-3273 24 , 25 &
• Peter Tyrrell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9599-8138 26 , 27  

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume  4 ,  pages 1300–1310 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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The SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 illness are driving a global crisis. Governments have responded by restricting human movement, which has reduced economic activity. These changes may benefit biodiversity conservation in some ways, but in Africa, we contend that the net conservation impacts of COVID-19 will be strongly negative. Here, we describe how the crisis creates a perfect storm of reduced funding, restrictions on the operations of conservation agencies, and elevated human threats to nature. We identify the immediate steps necessary to address these challenges and support ongoing conservation efforts. We then highlight systemic flaws in contemporary conservation and identify opportunities to restructure for greater resilience. Finally, we emphasize the critical importance of conserving habitat and regulating unsafe wildlife trade practices to reduce the risk of future pandemics.

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Caught in the crossfire: biodiversity conservation paradox of sociopolitical conflict

The world is currently facing a major disease pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2 and its associated illness, COVID-19 1 . Governments are taking drastic steps to stem disease spread, including international travel restrictions and lockdowns of hundreds of millions of people. These measures are having massive socioeconomic impacts, as businesses and industries halt or scale back operations. The world’s stock markets have become volatile, and a global recession is imminent. Virtually all sectors of life are affected and will likely remain so for at least 6–12 months 2 . Africa’s economy could suffer from reductions in foreign investment, reduced inflows of remittances and foreign aid, and lower overall earnings 3 . Gross domestic products (GDPs) may contract by 4%, and governments face reduced tax revenues and devalued currencies, resulting in severe budget deficits and knock-on effects on African livelihoods 4 . Lockdown restrictions and economic turmoil could also compromise conservation of Africa’s immensely valuable wildlife and wildlands, and the people who benefit from them.

Africa has nearly 2,000 Key Biodiversity Areas and supports the world’s most diverse and abundant large mammal populations 5 , 6 . Financially, the most apparent value of Africa’s wildlife and wildlands stems from wildlife-based tourism, which generates over US$29 billion annually and employs 3.6 million people 7 . Trophy hunting, a subset of the tourism industry, generates an estimated ~US$217 million annually over >1 million km 2 (refs. 8 , 9 ). Tourism helps governments justify protecting wildlife habitat. It creates revenue for state wildlife authorities, generates foreign exchange earnings, diversifies and strengthens local economies, and contributes to food security and poverty alleviation (Table 1 ). Tourism generates 40% more full-time jobs per unit investment than agriculture, has twice the job creation power of the automotive, telecommunications and financial industries, and employs proportionally more women than other sectors 10 .

Africa’s wildlife also attracts considerable foreign investment via funding for conservation efforts (Table 1 ). Contributors range from multilateral institutions and bilateral funding agencies to private foundations, philanthropists, zoos and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Reliable data on the scale and composition of donor funding are scarce, but external support makes up a substantial proportion of the total funding for wildlife conservation (Table 1 ). For example, donor contributions account for 32% of protected area (PA) funding in Africa, reaching 70–90% in some countries 11 .

Wildlands and conservation areas provide critical resources for local people who benefit from using wildlife, grass, water, firewood and non-timber forest products. During times of distress such as economic downturns, people rely more heavily on such resources 12 . In addition, Africa’s wildlife provides important cultural and heritage values for multiple ethnic groups, and charismatic species have extensive symbolic value internationally 13 . Africa’s wildlife also holds considerable ‘existence’ value—the value people derive from simply knowing it exists 14 .

The state of African conservation

The backbone of African conservation efforts is made up of 7,800 terrestrial PAs covering 5.3 million km 2 , ~17% of the continent’s land area 15 . PA coverage in some countries (notably in southern and East Africa) far exceeds the global average. In parts of Africa, vast transfrontier conservation areas transcend national borders, creating protected landscapes spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. Most PAs are state-owned and managed by government wildlife authorities, often with substantial support from tourism and hunting operators 16 . Increasingly, conservation NGOs and private sector entities cooperate with governments to manage state-owned PAs through collaborative management partnerships (CMPs) 17 . In addition, conservation efforts on private and community lands have grown in recent years 18 , 19 , expanding wildlife habitat, buffering PAs, reducing edge-effects, improving ecosystem representation, securing seasonal migration areas, and meaningfully engaging and benefiting rural communities that live with wildlife 20 , 21 , 22 . In Namibia, community conservancies account for 170,000 km 2 , and in South Africa, game ranches cover 205,000 km 2 , both exceeding the land area encompassed by state PAs 19 , 23 . Community-based conservation (CBC) programmes have grown in the last 20 years, supporting millions of rural African livelihoods 22 , 24 .

Despite impressive political commitment to conservation in Africa, the continent suffers severe and persistent funding shortages that hinder management effectiveness. Africa’s state-owned savannah PAs with lions face recurrent budget deficits of US$1.2 billion per annum, rendering wildlife susceptible to threats, while forest PAs are likely no better protected 11 . Key threats include habitat loss, degradation, fragmentation, encroachment, poaching and climate change 25 , 26 , 27 . These factors, combined with poor governance, poverty, increasing human populations and illegal wildlife trade, continue to drive wildlife declines across the continent 11 , 28 , 29 , 30 . In particular, the loss of large mammals compromises ecosystem function 31 , 32 . Thus, with few localized exceptions, African conservation was in crisis even before COVID-19 hit. The pandemic could amplify the crisis to catastrophic effect.

Environmental impacts of the COVID-19 crisis

Researchers have documented some positive environmental outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, reduced industrial activity and mechanized transport have lowered emissions and air pollution worldwide 33 . Some Asian countries (notably China and Vietnam) have taken steps to restrict trade that threatens wildlife. If regulated and enforced over the long term, such restrictions could reduce poaching in Africa for illegally sourced products that supply Asian markets. Gabon has banned consumption of bats and pangolins following the COVID-19 crisis 34 . Transport restrictions due to lockdowns may curb trade in wildlife products and provide respite for PAs that suffer negative impacts of tourist congestion.

These positive environmental outcomes are likely temporary and prone to reversal when travel restrictions ease and countries return to business as usual. We argue that the net environmental impact of the COVID-19 crisis in Africa will be strongly negative because the crisis creates a ‘perfect storm’ of reduced funding, lower conservation capacity, and increased threats to wildlife and ecosystems (Fig. 1 ). Wildlife conservation arguably faces its most serious challenge in decades.

Arrows indicate the directionality of potential impacts among different elements in Africa’s conservation framework.

Reduced conservation funding

Governments face severe budget crises driven by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost of relief measures. Shortages will compel policymakers to cut anything perceived as ‘non-essential’ 4 . African wildlife authority budgets, already grossly inadequate, risk being slashed further, jeopardizing wildlife and wildlands.

Compounding these effects is the continent-wide collapse of wildlife-based tourism due to travel restrictions and traveller concerns (Fig. 2 ; Table 1 ). While previous shocks, for example, the 2014 Ebola epidemic and the 2008 financial crisis, markedly reduced tourism in some African countries, the negative, continent-wide impacts of COVID-19 on the industry are unprecedented in scale and severity 35 . Some 90% of African tour operators have experienced >75% declines in bookings 36 . Because tourism is the largest contributor to PA financing in some countries, lost revenues have major ramifications for state wildlife authorities, private concessionaires and landowners, and community conservation programmes (Figs. 1 and 2 ) 37 . Decreasing tourism revenue threatens millions of jobs and peripheral industries, severely impacting the livelihoods of some of the continent’s poorest people (Box 1 ). For nations less reliant on wildlife tourism for conservation (for example, in the forest biome), the impact will be lower. However, if the industry is slow to bounce back, under-visited PAs developing nascent tourism products may be the last to see visitors.

‘Africa’s terrestrial protected areas’ refers to all nationally gazetted, terrestrial protected areas in Africa 15 . The source of each example is shown in Supplementary Table 1 .

Beyond tourism revenue losses, we expect reduced donor funding for African conservation over the next 1–2 years and possibly longer due to flagging economies and shifting priorities. During the previous global financial crisis, total charitable giving in the United States dropped by 7% in 2008 and 6.2% in 2009 38 , and conservation endowments declined in value by 40% 39 . The current economic downturn and stock market volatility, to an even greater degree, may reduce capacity of private donors, corporations and foundations to give philanthropically. Restrictions on travel and gatherings have caused cancellation and postponement of key conferences and conservation fund-raising events. Many zoos are closed, and reduced revenues will likely limit support for in situ conservation efforts. The pandemic will also shift focus from conservation towards humanitarian causes. Some bi- and multilateral donor agencies increased funding to developing countries in response to the 2008 financial crisis 40 , but the extent of the current economic and humanitarian challenges is such that any additional funding would likely be directed at those realms. Some emergency conservation funding is being organized in response to the crisis 36 , though it will likely fall far short of offsetting losses.

Box 1 Impact of COVID-19 on local communities and conservation threats

People living on the periphery of PAs are often food-insecure, neglected by governments and heavily dependent on natural resources 96 . However, they are the users of and potential custodians of natural resources. They bear costs of conservation (for example, through human–wildlife conflict, exclusion from natural resources, and, in some cases, loss of land), often without receiving commensurate benefits. For several decades, community-based conservationists have tested economic and engagement models to empower local communities to own and manage natural resources in the ecosystems where they live 97 .

The COVID-19 crisis challenges these models. Impacts on community-based conservation and the tourism industry have massive economic implications for communities 3 . Loss of tourism and trophy hunting revenue can increase opportunity costs of conservation and the risk of land conversion. The sudden loss of wildlife-based revenue could erode communities’, private landowners’, and even governments’ confidence in wildlife conservation as a reliable land-use option. Movement restrictions and social-distancing rules curtail engagement between conservation groups and communities, compromising hard-won trust with local people 98 .

Besides the loss of tourism revenue, rural communities face financial hardship from the wider economic turmoil wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and governmental responses. In some areas, livestock markets have closed, cutting off revenue streams for rural communities. Nearly 20 million jobs are at risk on the continent if the crisis continues 3 . Following lockdown-driven unemployment, people may return to rural homes, as has been observed for transnational labourers, many of whom returned to communities next to PAs near international borders 99 .

Increased poverty and food insecurity will likely increase conservation threats. In the absence of financial capital reserves, food-insecure rural Africans could be attracted to the periphery of PAs to draw upon natural resources 100 . Anticipated effects include increased poaching, tree cutting for timber and charcoal, artisanal mining, PA encroachment by people and livestock, and conversion of natural habitat 101 . We expect the threat posed by the increase in consumption of bushmeat to be particularly severe, with anecdotal evidence reported from Tsavo East National Park ( https://go.nature.com/32rNQYH ). These threats will coincide with reduced funding, operational ability, and field presence of community conservancies, state wildlife authorities, private landowners, conservation NGOs, and tourism and hunting companies.

Following the emergency response to the crisis in the periphery of PAs, new models linking conservation and local development will be needed.

Impaired conservation operations

Reduced funding is likely to constrain the ability of conservation practitioners to manage PAs and other conservation landscapes, force lay-offs of key staff, and prevent purchase of critical supplies 35 (Figs. 1 and 2 , Box 1 ). In addition, COVID-related restrictions on people’s movements undermine the ability of practitioner agencies to undertake their conservation work, as reported by the author group’s extended network of field colleagues (Figs. 1 and 2 ). Some lockdown policies in African countries prevent all but ‘essential services’. Generally, anti-poaching seems to be permitted, but rotating staff and supplying field rangers with essential consumables may be disrupted, resulting in exhaustion and reduced morale of rangers (Figs. 1 and 2 ). Policies that prevent operations and activities deemed non-essential could have considerable impacts on community conservation, which often relies on regular meetings, interactions and collaboration among a variety of actors, often without access to remote communication technology (Box 1 ).

Increased conservation threats

Natural resources and the ecosystems that produce them face heightened pressure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Plummeting tourism revenue and negative economic impacts of the pandemic will likely increase rural poverty. Simultaneously, COVID-19-related restrictions and budget constraints will impair conservation operations. Consequently, as detailed in Fig. 1 and Box 1 , we expect increased poaching, tree cutting, artisanal mining, PA encroachment, agricultural conversion and possibly the ultimate degazettement of the most-affected PAs. With many ecosystems and wildlife populations already near tipping points, the current crisis may result in population declines, local extinctions of some species, and intensified disruptions of ecological processes 6 .

Risk of future outbreaks due to human impacts on nature

The COVID-19 pandemic, like the SARS-CoV 1 and Ebola epidemics, likely originated from human consumption of wild animals. Live wildlife markets create opportunities for pathogens to infect naïve domestic species or humans and trigger new diseases 41 , 42 . In Africa, particularly in the tropical forest biome, bushmeat markets expose human populations to species identified as high risk for pathogen spillover, such as primates, bats and rodents 43 . The combined effects of reduced conservation efforts and increased poverty could create a positive feedback loop where intensified reliance on natural resources spurs human encroachment into natural habitats, increases exposure to and consumption of wild animals, and amplifies future pandemic risks 44 . Conversely, effective conservation of species and habitats has been directly linked to decreases in the number of viruses that animals share with humans 45 . Adapted disease surveillance systems, especially for the wildlife–domestic–human interface, need to be developed and supported in emergence hotspots 46 .

How can the world mitigate these risks?

The conservation crisis facing Africa must not be overlooked, even as governments and NGOs respond to the health and humanitarian crisis. While the current focus on health and the economy is critical, a longer-term perspective is vital. Supporting conservation efforts will help national and local African economies recover from the devastating impacts of COVID-19 by diversifying and bolstering economies, creating employment for rural citizens, and protecting ecosystem services. Safeguarding wild habitats against encroachment can also help tackle a key root cause of emerging zoonotic diseases, lessening future pandemic risks. Reducing support for African conservation at this critical juncture could undo decades of progress. Here, we describe steps necessary to safeguard African wildlife and landscapes and associated rural populations during and beyond the COVID-19 crisis. We outline actions needed to (1) manage the immediate crisis; (2) tackle environmental destruction and address the ongoing threats of habitat destruction and illegal, unsustainable and/or unsafe wildlife trade; and (3) address systemic flaws in the current conservation model.

1. Manage the immediate crisis

African conservation will flounder unless the international community intervenes to provide crisis funding, recognizing conservation as an essential service and PAs as global public goods. The developed world is rapidly implementing mechanisms to bail out impacted businesses and industries, which in the United States runs into trillions of dollars. However, cash-strapped governments in developing countries lack such potential. Furthermore, no such mechanisms exist for supporting conservation specifically. Donors could unite to create an emergency fund for struggling wildlife authorities, communities, private landowners and conservation NGOs. In addition, key industries underpinning conservation efforts, such as tourism, need support, both via tax breaks and direct financial assistance, provided they can demonstrate ongoing investment into protection of the wildlands on which they depend. Realistically, the developed world would have to be the primary source of such funding, from multi- and bilateral institutions, corporations and the public. International philanthropic foundations have an opportunity to intervene, make a transformational difference to conservation in Africa and help avert disaster.

Business as usual will not be possible for most conservation practitioners during the crisis. They will require strategic planning to prioritize critical activities and minimize risks of ‘overstretching’. They should emphasize maintaining crucial operations and retaining as many members of staff as possible, such that they can expand again when the crisis abates. Conservation practitioners and large NGOs in particular must cut wastage and excesses. NGOs should prioritize salaries for staff in Africa where possible, noting that salary protection schemes do not generally exist on the continent.

2. Defend against future disease outbreaks by regulating wildlife trade and minimizing habitat loss

China and Vietnam have taken steps to restrict trade and consumption of wildlife in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Worldwide, governments and organizations should improve regulations and enforce existing laws to clamp down on unsafe wildlife trade practices that jeopardize human health or conservation objectives. Trade restrictions should be appropriate, proportionate and enacted with local buy-in and political commitment. Otherwise, unsustainable or dangerous trade may resume as soon as the immediate crisis abates. Efforts to stamp out unsafe and unsustainable practices should not, however, undermine legal components of the wildlife trade industry that are or could be well regulated, pose a controlled disease-transmission risk and support millions of livelihoods 47 .

In addition to addressing the disease-transmission risk of the wildlife trade, governments and organizations should tackle the other critical drivers of infectious disease emergence including habitat destruction, which can be driven by industrial livestock production 44 , 48 . In forest regions of the continent, logging and mining are encroaching into remote areas 49 , 50 , likely facilitating disease spread into and amongst human populations, as seen in the Amazon 51 . Forest regions urgently require flexible funding mechanisms to prevent the sale of forest concessions and construction of development corridors through and unsustainable resource extraction from natural habitats. Such steps could also help protect Indigenous peoples from disease and from losing ancestral lands.

3. Address systemic flaws in the structure and function of conservation in Africa

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the fragility of conservation efforts in Africa and has exposed fundamental shortcomings (Fig. 3 ).

Enhancing the magnitude and diversity of funding could increase resilience and efficacy. For more detail, see Table 2 . Photograph credit: Morgan Trimble.

Baseline funding for conservation from African governments is simply inadequate. Many nations struggle with high poverty rates and do not have the luxury and the wealth to conserve African wildlife and wildlands alone. Currently, overreliance on short term, ad hoc external funding streams (including philanthropy) is unsustainable and insecure. Many PAs rely on a single, inadequate funding source. Tourism is a promising but insufficient source of conservation funding. Some African countries’ overreliance on international tourism to support conservation creates vulnerability to stochastic events. Few hold sufficient funds in reserve to finance conservation operations through hard times. Other countries do not benefit substantially from wildlife-based tourism at all (Fig. 4 ). Where tourism does flourish, the communities bearing the costs of wildlife often receive negligible benefits, disincentivizing conservation.

a , The terrestrial ecoregions of Africa 91 . b , Percentage tree cover with >10% canopy density in 2000 92 (source: Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA). Countries are labelled with their ISO-3 codes. c , Mammal species richness 93 . d , Funding deficits of national protected area networks in African lion range states 11 . e , The average number of annual international tourist arrivals to African countries from 2016–2018 94 . f , The GDP per capita (corrected for purchasing power parity (PPP)) in current US dollars of African countries in 2018 95 . In d – f , countries are filled white where data were unavailable, and values were classified using the Jenks natural breaks method.

There is also a lack of sufficient, long-term, systematic support for African conservation from the Global North, who benefit considerably from Africa’s wildlife and lands, without contributing sufficiently towards its costs. Relative to their wealth, some African countries carry a disproportionately high burden from their conservation efforts and so, the international community should provide support at commensurate levels, recognizing that Africa’s natural treasures are global assets; environmental services from Africa benefit the world through carbon sequestration; and African ecosystems play a critical role in safeguarding human mental and physical health 11 , 12 , 13 , 52 .

Most fundamentally, there is insufficient alignment between conservation and human-development agendas. Here, we outline emerging opportunities to rethink and restructure conservation funding in Africa to improve long-term resilience (Fig. 3 ).

Increase the resilience of conservation

Africa is diverse, presenting an array of contexts in which conservation must be practised. Thus, the solutions we suggest must be tailored appropriately (Fig. 4 ).

3a. Recognize the reliance of development on natural assets

Effective long-term conservation in Africa depends on finding sufficient funding and building political and public will. Aligning conservation and development interests could help on both fronts. African economies depend considerably on ecosystem services, so this alignment can be supported in several ways, for example:

Quantify the value of natural assets and ecosystem services and incorporate those values into national budgets, balance sheets, and planning for natural resource use to reinforce the value of conservation.

Position PAs in their broader landscapes as hubs for local development, service provision and even disaster relief. This has been achieved via collaborative management partnerships for some African PAs 17 , 24 .

Properly engage local people as stakeholders in conservation. Inside PAs, create forums that enable communities to participate in PA governance and ensure communities benefit from tourism to strengthen engagement. Outside PAs, promote policies that devolve resource and wildlife utilization rights to communities to support sustainable management and strengthen institutions that allow communities to optimize their economic opportunities 53 .

Encourage conservation organizations to work with development specialists on visible support for core community livelihoods, such as livestock and crop production, thereby earning public backing and increasing resilience of local communities to shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic 22 . For example, if conservation organizations provide security or markets for livestock, local people would link those benefits to conservation; the ‘herding for health’ programme is testing this approach in northern Kenya and southern Africa 54 .

3b. Support African civil society conservation efforts

With international conservation organizations limited by travel restrictions, there is an opportunity for national conservation organizations and civil society efforts to fill gaps. International partners should support local people and services by providing funding and sharing expertise remotely. Once the crisis has subsided, local conservation capacity will have increased and could continue to be supported, together with revived efforts by international NGOs.

3c. Diversify revenue-generating options from wildlife areas

The volatility of international tourism and decline in trophy hunting demonstrate the need to create local revenue streams that are resilient to global shocks (Fig. 3 , Table 2 ). Only a handful of African countries earn substantial wildlife tourism revenue 16 . Others need to unlock tourism potential by investing in infrastructure and wildlife protection and creating an enabling environment for tourism 55 , 56 (Fig. 3 , Table 2 ). Conversely, some southern and East African nations heavily reliant on international tourism should foster domestic tourism to increase resilience to global shocks and build longer-term public support for conservation 57 , 58 . With the trophy hunting industry apparently waning, due in part to pressure from Western anti-hunting advocates, PAs that currently depend on trophy hunting revenue should seek alternative income streams 59 . Given the existing serious funding deficits for conservation in Africa (Fig. 4 ), collapse of the trophy hunting industry in the absence of alternatives carries grave ramifications for conservation across vast areas 16 , 59 . Wealthier countries must contribute towards alternative and improved revenue-generating mechanisms to help pay for the management and opportunity costs of Africa’s vast network of semi-protected areas. In some contexts, livestock or sustainable use of wildlife can be compatible with conservation 60 , 61 . In South Africa, a biodiversity economy strategy promotes bioprospecting and game ranching for hunting and meat-, skin- and leather exports as key revenue streams complementing eco-tourism 62 . Africa is developing at a rapid pace, and governments should use the ‘biodiversity mitigation hierarchy’ to diminish ecological damage and mandate offset payments to generate sustainable revenue for conservation 63 .

3d. Increase domestic expenditure

Ultimately, for wildlife and wildlands to deliver on their economic potential, African governments must invest sufficiently to protect their own assets. After the crisis subsides, African nations could identify a set budgetary allocation for the protection of nature, similar to the 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security. National governments could also establish endowment funds with the help of foreign investment, mandate a biodiversity mitigation hierarchy, and develop green and blue bonds.

3e. Increase international funding

While greater domestic investment is desirable, substantially more financial support is needed beyond this. Emerging mechanisms for international governments, corporations, individuals and NGOs to provide funding include investments in PAs and community land, payments for ecosystem and cultural services, and debt-for-nature swaps (Table 2 ).

3f. Improve revenue distribution mechanisms

Africa needs improved mechanisms to effectively generate and disburse wildlife-related revenue and offset the opportunity, indirect and direct costs of wildlife. Such mechanisms need to recognize the role of governments, private landowners, and communities in Africa as custodians of global wildlife assets. Examples include: (1) direct payments by wealthy countries to African nations for setting aside wilderness, such as the payments made by Norway to Gabon 64 ; (2) land leases, whereby land is leased from owners and set aside for conservation to prevent conversion to less biodiversity friendly land use, as occurs, for example, in conservancies around the Maasai Mara 65 ; (3) biodiversity stewardship programmes that pay or incentivize landowners to practice conservation-friendly land management; (4) performance payment schemes that reward local people for conserving wildlife (as is being trialled in Mozambique, Namibia and Tanzania, for example, http://wildlifecredits.com ); (5) ‘conservation basic incomes’ that compensate communities who protect nature 66 ; and (6) schemes and actions that reduce the cost of coexisting with wildlife 67 .

Conclusions

The COVID-19 crisis threatens conservation efforts in Africa with a ‘perfect storm’ of reduced conservation funding, depleted management capacity, collapse of community-based natural resource management enterprises, and elevated threats. The crisis demands a concerted international effort to protect and support Africa’s wildlife and wildlands and people that are dependent on them. African governments, the international community, donors and conservation practitioners should collaborate through decisive effort and adaptive management to minimize negative impacts. At this critical juncture, business as usual could be catastrophic, but decisive and collaborative action can ensure that Africa’s wildlife survives COVID-19 and that more resilient conservation models benefit humans and wildlife for generations.

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Acknowledgements

A.C. and N.G. were supported by the EU funded ‘ProSuLi in TFCAs’ project (FED/20 I 7/ 394 -443) and the research platform RP-PCP ( www.rp-pcp.org ). A.D. was supported by a fellowship from the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation.

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Peter Lindsey

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Peter Lindsey & Paul Thomson

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James Allan

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Lindsey, P., Allan, J., Brehony, P. et al. Conserving Africa’s wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. Nat Ecol Evol 4 , 1300–1310 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1275-6

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COVID-19 and protected areas: Impacts, conflicts, and possible management solutions

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute University of Cambridge Cambridge UK.
• 2 Snowdonia National Park Authority Penrhyndeudraeth Wales UK.
• 3 Department of Environment University of the Aegean Mytilene Greece.
• PMID: 34230839
• PMCID: PMC8250896
• DOI: 10.1111/conl.12800

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, management authorities of numerous Protected Areas (PAs) had to discourage visitors from accessing them in order to reduce the virus transmission rate and protect local communities. This resulted in social-ecological impacts and added another layer of complexity to managing PAs. This paper presents the results of a survey in Snowdonia National Park capturing the views of over 700 local residents on the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions and possible scenarios and tools for managing tourist numbers. Lower visitor numbers were seen in a broadly positive way by a significant number of respondents while benefit sharing issues from tourism also emerged. Most preferred options to manage overcrowding were restricting access to certain paths, the development of mobile applications to alert people to overcrowding and reporting irresponsible behavior. Our findings are useful for PA managers and local communities currently developing post-COVID-19 recovery strategies.

Keywords: Wales; biodiversity conservation; lockdown; overcrowding; protected areas management; social impacts; visitors.

© 2021 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest

Life during lockdown for locals…

Life during lockdown for locals in Snowdonia National Park (Spring 2020): Positive and…

Impact of COVID‐19 restrictions linked…

Impact of COVID‐19 restrictions linked with the National Park

Preferences for different tools managing…

Preferences for different tools managing overcrowding in Snowdonia National Park

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How COVID-19 is Affecting the World’s Protected and Conserved Areas

Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC) changed its name to Re:wild in 2021

A global publication outlines the strains the pandemic is putting on parks – and the opportunities for new ways of thinking.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have turned to nature to relieve stress and improve our mental health. A stroll through a park or forest can feel like a much-needed escape from sheltering in place. At the same time, this outbreak has reminded us that nature is not separate from humanity – our fates are intertwined. Whether we live in urban or rural areas, the planet is our home. The coronavirus came from our encroachment upon wildlife and wildlands, and now our response to it is putting severe stress on our world’s protected and conserved areas.

Protected and conserved areas such as national parks make up at least 15% of the world’s land surface . These areas provide refuge for plants and animals, biodiverse buffers against climate change, homes for Indigenous Peoples and livelihoods for local communities. In a paper released in the latest issue of PARKS, The International Journal of Protected Areas and Conservation , 35 conservationists compiled a comprehensive account of how protected and conserved areas around the world are being impacted by COVID-19. GWC Director of Protected Area Management Mike Appleton and GWC Senior Director of Species Conservation Dr. Barney Long, are among the paper’s authors.

“Across the global protected area community, we realized pretty quickly that COVID-19 was going to have some serious impacts,” says Appleton. “We had a strong desire to give a ‘state of the parks’ report early on so we can be aware of the problems as well as opportunities for new types of action and new ways of thinking when we come out on the other side of this.”

After gathering data and updates from members of the World Commission on Protected Areas and partners at parks all over the world, the paper’s authors found humans’ changing patterns of movement, spending and resource consumption are straining parks.

Declining revenues, budgets and staff

Lockdowns and travel restrictions have significantly decreased tourism to many protected and conserved areas. A recent survey of African safari tour operators found over 90% had experienced a 75% or greater decline in bookings and many had no bookings at all. Tourism employs 16 million people in Africa, either directly or indirectly, and represents the main income source for many families.

This loss of income from tourism is unlikely to be short-lived: a study by Global Rescue and the World Travel and Tourism Council (2019) found the average time from impact to economic recovery of tourism following disease outbreaks was 19.4 months. This major loss of tourism revenue has caused many parks to cut staff and programs.

At the same time, many governments are reallocating funds from their environmental budgets to pay for pandemic response.

“Coronavirus is a massive emergency, but this is a short-sighted approach,” says Long. “All the zoonotic disease outbreaks over the last decades have come from the wild because that human/wild interface is expanding. Protected areas are the cornerstone of protecting the wild, so pulling funding is the exact opposite of what we need to do.”

Budget cuts mean rangers and other staff have to do more with less . Some protected areas, especially community conservancies and privately protected areas that depend heavily on tourism to pay staff salaries, have had to reduce enforcement capacity. They’ve also had to abandon or postpone monitoring and routine management tasks. And in some areas rangers are being diverted to distribute food or transport personal protective equipment to places of need.

Increased human reliance on parks

At the same time, many parks are seeing increased pressures that need monitoring and enforcement – and that can lead to degradation of land and threats to species over time.

There are increased reports of illegal resource extraction in many countries. In Nepal for example, more cases of illegal extraction of forest resources, such as illicit logging and harvesting, took place in the first month of lockdown (514 cases) than in the entire previous year (483 cases). Hard data on poaching trends during the lockdown is not yet widely available, and while some areas are seeing relief, others are reporting increases. For example, six musk deer were killed in Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal, in one of the worst recent cases of wildlife poaching in the region.

Another source of pressure comes from more people turning to parks to fulfill their basic needs, from food to fuel wood. After losing their jobs, many city dwellers have returned to their family homes in villages near parks. And many living in those villages have also lost income streams.

“Natural resources are usually an insurance policy in times of hardship for people close to the poverty line,” Long says. And we've seen millions, if not billions of people across the world fall into times of hardship. Historically, that wouldn't have been a problem, but now we've got so few natural resources left, and lots of them are concentrated in these parks.”

Additionally, while many protected areas are suffering from lack of tourism revenue, widespread closures have put increased visitor pressures on those remaining open.

Addressing short-term needs

GWC works with protected and conserved areas worldwide to develop long-term conservation strategies for both wildlife and wildlands. Right now, our focus is on helping with emergency response and filling critical gaps while respecting the needs of our Indigenous partners. In many parks, Indigenous residents have closed their territory to the outside world to protect themselves. This is true of the residents of Mounts Iglit-Baco Natural Park in the Philippines, with whom we’re working to save the Tamaraw , a Critically Endangered wild dwarf buffalo.

“We are relying on text messages and WhatsApp messages through intermediaries and doing our best,” Appleton says. While we can’t do fieldwork right now, there are a lot of other jobs we can do to help our partners, including developing reports, systems and processes; conducting studies; writing project proposals; fundraising; and making sure everyone's well and looked after and okay.”

Looking at long-term recovery

The PARKS paper lays out three scenarios for long-term recovery: a return to normal, a global economic depression and decline in conservation and protection, or a new and transformative relationship with nature. It is too early to predict which scenarios will play out in various regions around the world.

The global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic can make this overwhelming. But it also provides an opportunity: parks and organizations can share information and best practices. The paper recommends several calls to action, noting that effectively, equitably managed networks of well-connected protected and conserved areas provide one of the most important ways In which to strengthen and repair the relationship between people and the natural systems on which they depend. A focus on equity not only recognizes the rights and ownership of Indigenous Peoples, but it can also provide stability going forward.

“The systems we’ve established to manage many parks are incredibly vulnerable because as soon as funding streams are cut off, they start to fail,” says Appleton. “At GWC we’re focused on co-management arrangements, where Indigenous Peoples and local people are managers, supported by or in partnership with government agencies. In many cases, it’s the most effective, most cost-efficient and sustainable way of doing it.”

GWC will be working with the World Commission on Protected Areas to explore long-term recovery solutions. In April, we launched the Coalition to End the Trade with Wildlife Conservation Society and WildAid to prevent the next pandemic by permanently ending the commercial trade and sale in markets of terrestrial wild animals (particularly birds and mammals), for consumption.

Taking action every day: what you can do

Many people wonder what they can do to make a difference. The first thing is to visit your nearest park as soon as you’re able to do so. Be a responsible visitor by staying on trails, practicing social distancing, wearing a face covering and following the park’s guidelines. And if you see a ranger, thank them – they’re the essential workers of our planet.

“The wild is essential to our future well-being. Not only for the sake of the plants and animals. It’s great therapy for people who've been living stressed existences for months, and is also as an insurance against this happening again. It’s important to enjoy it and to tell other people, decision-makers, that it's important to you,” says Appleton.

(Top photo by Robin Moore, Global Wildlife Conservation)

About the author

Erica Hess is a strategic content writer specializing in sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Erica enjoys telling stories about people finding new ways to protect our planet’s vital resources. Her work has helped raise awareness of issues ranging from overfishing to electronics recycling. Learn more at plumemarketing.com.

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Conserving Nature in a time of crisis: Protected Areas and COVID-19

Many of the threats facing biodiversity and protected areas will be exacerbated during, and following, the Covid-19 outbreak. The health of humans, animals and ecosystems are interconnected. An expanding agricultural frontier and human incursions into natural areas for logging, mining and other purposes has led to habitat loss and fragmentation, increased contact between human and wildlife and greater exploitation and trade of wild animal products. This enables the spread of diseases from animal populations to humans who have little or no resistance to them; Covid-19 is just the latest and most widespread of these zoonotic pandemics, following SARS, MERS and Ebola.

Photo: IUCN / Charles Besancon

Protected and conserved areas are key to maintaining healthy ecosystems, protecting diverse natural habitats and wild species; terrestrial protected areas now cover more than 15% of the world’s land surface. But PAs are not just about wildlife or biodiversity, important though these are. When governed and managed effectively, they also support human health and well-being, contributing to food and water security, disaster risk reduction, climate mitigation and adaptation, and local livelihoods. Globally there is increasing recognition of these wider benefits (IPBES 2019), but these contributions of well-managed protected areas are still often undervalued, or ignored, when it comes to practical policy or development decisions.

This global pandemic will have both immediate and longer-term effects on protected and conserved areas. The pandemic has already resulted in the closure of parks and protected areas in many countries, resulting in a cascade of impacts:

• Park staff being sent home to self-isolate or even being laid off. Many park agencies are already cutting staff duties.  Because staffing levels are key to protected area effectiveness, this can have serious impacts on conservation of key habitats and species.
• Closure of protected areas to people for tourism and recreation. Many protected areas have been closed to visitors. For example, World Heritage sites have been completely closed to visitation in 72 percent of the 167 countries with listed sites, though anti-poaching patrols, monitoring and emergency interventions may continue. [i]
• Concerns that charismatic threatened species may be susceptible to the virus has led to closures of areas supporting gorillas and other great ape populations [ii] .
• Suspension of protected area management and restoration programmes, including fire management, invasive alien species control, and species re-introductions.  In Australia, efforts to restore park habitats damaged during the catastrophic wildfires are now on hold. 
• Reduced revenue from tourism and cuts in park operational budgets. This can be especially challenging for private protected areas and community conservancies.    For example, in the Mara Nabisco Conservancy in Kenya, tourism revenue that provided the salaries of 40 rangers has ceased entirely [iii] and the closure of local businesses linked to tourism has resulted in the loss of employment and livelihoods for over 600 Maasai families.
• Suspension of ranger patrols is widespread in some parts of the world, with the resulting possibility of environmentally-damaging activities, including agricultural encroachment, illegal logging and poaching. There are already emerging reports of increased poaching and illegal resource extraction in countries such as Cambodia [iv] , India [v] , South Africa and Botswana [vi] linked to loss of rural livelihoods and reduced capacity to conduct patrols and fieldwork by enforcement staff [vii] .

As nations emerge from the lockdown phase there will be additional challenges for protected areas:  a global economic depression, job losses, reallocation of government budgets to priorities such as health and social care needs, changing personal views on international travel, but hopefully, also, greater appreciation of nature and the importance of conservation and protected areas. There will be challenges associated with reopening parks and other natural spaces though there is growing recognition of how important access to nature is to human physical and mental health. Longer term governments are likely to invest in massive stimulus packages to restart and revive economies, with the risk of reduced environmental regulation and fewer funds allocated for conservation.   Unless carefully regulated these stimulus packages are likely to have major, if unintended, impacts on natural habitats and protected areas, with large-scale infrastructure, agriculture and resource exploitation leading to further habitat loss and fragmentation.  There is already substantial concern over increased deforestation in Brazil where illegal logging and other criminal activities have led to an increase in forest loss of more than 60% in April compared to the same month  last year, with more than 400 square kilometres of rainforest were destroyed, an area  more than double the size of Washington, DC [viii] .

In the face of these challenges the Commission is supporting a range of activities related to the pandemic:

• Understanding the scope of the problem. We need to understand the scope of the impacts on protected areas and the consequences of closures and reduced resources.  The WCPA Vice Chair for Eastern and Southern Africa is running an online survey of African protected areas and the impacts from the pandemics. Other WCPA regions are considering doing the same.
• Assessing the impact on protected area tourism . The WCPA Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group is contributing to a study for the European Union (EU) on COVID-19 and protected area tourism to evaluate the impact on protected areas, businesses and local communities.  
• A focus on urban settlements. World Urban Parks is hosting a  COVID19 International Park Expert Roundtable  with WCPA and other partners to discuss how to collaborate both during and after this global crisis on the importance of urban parks for people in our rapidly changing world. A series of webinars were hosted during Parks Week (April 23-30).
• MPA News has been hosting an exchange about the impacts of covid-19 on MPAs, including challenges for management and enforcement, monitoring and impacts on marine protected areas which depend on tourism for financing – see MPA News
• Connecting people with nature. Given the confinement of many people to their homes, #NatureforAll, a joint initiative with the Commission on Education and Communication (CEC), and many other partners, is preparing a broad online repository of environmental education material and resources that will help people to connect with nature whatever the circumstances. This new online space is the  #NatureForAll Discovery Zone .
• Collating information through collaboration.  WCPA has established a new Task Force on COVID-19 and Protected and Conserved Areas, and is working with other Commissions and the IUCN Secretariat to assess the impact of the pandemic on conservation and what IUCN can do to address the problem.
• Working with others - Commission members are collaborating with the High Ambition Coalition to promote the need for more and better managed protected and conserved areas – see Webinar 1 and Webinar 2.

Looking Ahead

• The IUCN WCPA Urban Conservation Strategies Specialist Group is preparing guidance for visitor management when parks and trails reopen.  There is already some guidance available in the Best Practice Guidelines on Urban Protected Areas .
• Contributing to the Global Biodiversity Framework. The year 2020 was to have been a “super-year” for nature, with new global biodiversity targets, including protected areas, to be agreed at COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This process is now delayed because of the pandemic, but WCPA is still working actively in the process, through engagement of the Beyond the Aichi Targets Task Force   and members of the WCPA Steering Committee .
• The IUCN WCPA Health and Wellbeing Specialist Group has already been working with the health sector to better understand the contribution of nature and protected areas to human physical and mental health and the value of this contribution in economic terms.
• PARKS Journal – The Commission’s scientific journal PARKS is developing an Editorial Essay and Call for Action with a range of conservation leaders on the impacts and opportunities arising from the global pandemic.  
• Collating and disseminating information from national PA agencies for good news solutions designed to create new employment opportunities focussed on conservation and protected areas.  The New Zealand government has released a budget designed to revitalise the economy. The Department of Conservation will receive NZ$1.1 billion to invest in new jobs in environment and conservation over the next four years.
• IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille (January 7 -15, 2021) – WCPA is involved in organising many events at the Forum and Protected Planet Pavilion. Internally we have initiated a discussion within the Commission on what the pandemic means for the programme in Marseille, including a greater emphasis in Forum and High-level events on the role of protected areas in supporting human health and well-being. The PANORAMA web platform features case studies that describe good practice in ensuring that PAs provide benefits for a broad set of human health and well-being issues; available here .
• The Covid-19 pandemic has diverted attention away from other global crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss but these challenges still need urgent attention. Going forward it will be even more important to ensure that governments understand, and invest in, the important role of well-managed and connected protected areas as natural solutions and ecosystem-based approaches to climate change, biodiversity conservation land degradation and human health.  Several WCPA Specialist Groups are working on collating information and best practice on the relevance of PAs to environmental challenges and the Sustainable Development Goals.  

IPBES. (2019). Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn, Germany.

[i] https://en.unesco.org/covid19/cultureresponse/monitoring-world-heritage-site-closures [ii] https://www.iucn.org/crossroads-blog/202004/quarantining-also-means-caring-our-great-ape-relatives [iii] https://www.basecampexplorer.com/foundation/emergency-appeal/ [iv] https://newsroom.wcs.org/News-Releases/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/14039/COVID-19-FUELING-AN-UPTICK-IN-POACHING-Three-Critically-Endangered-Giant-Ibis-Cambodias-National-Bird-Killed-in-Protected-Area.aspx [v] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52294991 [vi] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/coronavirus-poaching-rhinos.html [vii] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/brazil-scales-back-environmental-enforcement-coronavirus-outbreak-deforestation [viii] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/14/americas/coronavirus-amazon-brazil-destruction-intl/index.html

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Editorial Essay: COVID-19 and protected and conserved areas

2020, PARKS

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Impacts and Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic for Protected and Conserved Area Management

• Open Access
• First Online: 27 December 2023

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• Mitali Sharma 4 ,
• Mariana Napolitano Ferreira 5 ,
• Rachel Golden Kroner 6 &
• Mohammad K. S. Pasha 7  

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The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has taken millions of lives and has had a significant impact on societal norms. It has also affected nature and wildlife in numerous ways. Protected and Conserved Areas (PCAs), key interventions to safeguard nature, have only recently started to be discussed in the context of the pandemic even though natural spaces provide substantial ecological, social and economic value. PCAs are also important for reducing the risk of future pandemics as they can reduce land-use change—the main driver of emerging zoonotic diseases. This chapter aims to highlight the ecological, social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on PCAs and lessons learned for PCA management to strengthen their ecological and societal values. The ecological impacts of the pandemic on PCAs included increased illegal logging and poaching, and increased risks to species such as bats and apes. The social impacts included reduced ranger welfare from overworking and staff cuts, and increased risks for local communities and Indigenous peoples who rely on PCAs. Lastly, the economic impacts included reduced funding for PCAs, which threatens livelihoods and increases conservation threats. Based on these impacts, key recommendations include strengthening regulations and protection measures, increasing benefit sharing and increasing diverse sources of funding, particularly in more affected regions, such as Latin America and Africa. Additionally, the IUCN Green List and a One Health approach can be used for improved PCA management and recovery.

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• Protected areas
• IUCN Green List

14.1 Introduction

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that emerged in December 2019 (Zhou et al., 2020 ), has had numerous devastating impacts worldwide, the most significant being the death of over 6.5 million people (Word Health Organization, 2022 ). One of the less discussed impacts is the effect that this pandemic has had on protected and conserved areas (PCAs) and how to implement any lessons learned for improved PCA management. Protected areas (PAs), which include national parks, nature reserves, and more, are defined as ‘…a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values’ (Dudley, 2008 ). These areas are highly important to consider because not only do they conserve nature and biodiversity, but they also provide economic value to many communities, and can improve physical and mental well-being (Hockings et al., 2020 ).

Additionally, PAs provide food, clean water and medicines, and can buffer the effects of climate change: it is estimated that PAs worldwide store at least 12% of carbon on land (IUCN WCPA, 2021 ). Aside from PAs, conserved areas, which may not have the same level of restrictions as PAs or a primary conservation objective, are also important for conservation and livelihoods and can provide similar benefits. The term ‘conserved areas’ could be used more generally or could include ‘other effective area-based conservation measures’ (OECMs), which were defined by the Convention of Biological Diversity ( 2018 ) as ‘a geographically defined area other than a Protected Area, which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity, with associated ecosystem functions and services and, where applicable, cultural, spiritual, socioeconomic and other locally relevant values’. OECMs can cover a range of areas, such as Indigenous territories, fishing refuges and others, as long as they meet the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) criteria for an OECM (IUCN WCPA, 2022 ) and are approved for addition in the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) Protected Planet database.

PCAs are also important for the ‘One Health’ approach that is growing in popularity, which is defined as ‘a cross-sectoral and transdisciplinary approach that emphasizes the fundamental ways in which the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, fungi, plants, microbes, and natural and built ecosystems are interdependent’ (Redford et al., 2022 ). This is particularly relevant in the context of COVID-19 as PCAs are an important form of protection against epidemics and pandemics as they maintain ecosystem integrity (Dobson et al., 2020 ) and can thereby suppress pathogen spillover—the process by which pathogens from animals ‘jump’ into humans (Reaser et al., 2021 ). It is estimated that 72% of zoonotic diseases have originated from wildlife (as compared to those from domestic animals) (Jones et al., 2008 ); PCAs act as a buffer and help reduce human exposure to emerging zoonotic infectious diseases (Ferreira et al., 2021 ) as they limit the contact between humans and other wild species that could transmit disease; conversely, land clearing leads to an increased risk of zoonotic disease transmission, especially in the tropics (Allen et al., 2017 ).

Given the clear value of PCAs, it is critical to monitor and assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on them. Insights from such an assessment can provide lessons to support strategic management decisions on PCA recovery and rebuilding, including improved management in the future. Assessments and recovery are needed across three categories: ecological, social and economic, each building on the one before. This approach will ensure that multiple key aspects of the issue are targeted for relief and recovery. Authorities, PCA managers, rangers, Indigenous peoples, local communities and other relevant stakeholders need to be involved at a site level in the rebuilding process to design adaptive and appropriate responses. Aside from the on-site support, knowledge generation on the lessons learned is also key to understanding how to prevent and address negative impacts in the future.

This chapter aims to piece together the expertise on this topic in the style of a review and further elucidate the effect of three major types of impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic—ecological, social and economic on PCAs (Fig.  14.1 ), including regional differences, where information was available. We draw insights from scientific articles and literature published by conservationists worldwide and from a dedicated IUCN WCPA ‘COVID-19 and Protected Areas’ Task Force. This chapter also discusses the lessons learned and their implications for public policies and improving PCA management, highlighting the IUCN Green List.

Summary of the ecological, social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on PCAs

Economic impacts of the pandemic related to tourism in the Brazilian PA system

14.2 Ecological Impacts and Solutions

The COVID-19 pandemic has had several conflicting ecological impacts. Initially, it seemed as if nature could thrive again when lockdowns started occurring worldwide, as there had been many reports of wildlife re-occurring at sites and increases in species richness during these lockdowns (Manenti et al., 2020 ). Although there were positive effects including the increased breeding success of certain birds that are sensitive to human disturbance, and reduced road killings, there were also increases in invasive species and illegal hunting and fishing (Bennett et al., 2020 ; Manenti et al., 2020 ). This highlights the need to consider the various ecological implications of changes to human activities—especially for drastic changes such as during the lockdowns—on ecosystem functioning (Gilby et al., 2021 ). The negative ecological effects can be attributed to a reduction in patrolling, which greatly reduced the likelihood of detecting and responding to threats (Corlett et al., 2020 ). Researchers observed this globally, including with the illegal killing of birds on Italian islands (Manenti et al., 2020 ), and with wildlife poaching more than doubling in countries including Uganda and India during lockdowns (Athumani, 2020 ; Badola, 2020 ). In Bangladesh, poaching increased by 28 times during the 2020 lockdowns compared to 2019 (Rahman, 2021 ). However, there were reports that poaching decreased in other places, such as South Africa (Hockings et al., 2020 ).

Illegal land-use change was also a major ecological issue during the lockdowns. There were reports that illegal logging and natural resource extraction increased greatly in Nepal and Tunisia (Hockings et al., 2020 ). Countries with biodiversity-rich tropical forests experienced increased land clearing and mining as well (McNeely, 2021 ). Many parts of Asia, Africa and South America reported that deforestation increased during the pandemic (Fair, 2020 ), which has long-term implications for climate change; deforestation accounts for roughly ten per cent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (OECD, 2020 ) and even restoring these forests would not replace the carbon storage value of the older forests lost (Gibson et al., 2011 ). In the Brazilian Amazon, forest clearing increased by 28% in 2020 compared to the previous year (Escobar, 2020 ). Most of the land that had been cleared was changed into pastures for grazing cattle to support the beef industry in Brazil (McNeely, 2021 ).

In Bangladesh, these values were much higher—the number of forest loss alerts increased by 2,700% during the May 2020 lockdown period compared to the same period in 2019 (Rahman, 2021 ); this underscores the importance of considering regional variations. These statistics are concerning, as land-use change due to resource extraction or agriculture is the driving cause for zoonotic pathogen emergence (Ferreira et al., 2021 ) and has caused more than 30% of new diseases reported since 1960 (IPBES, 2020 ). Supporting PCAs and the achievement of global targets such as 30 × 30 (to protect 30% of terrestrial and marine spaces by 2030) would help limit land-use change if there are effective and equitable measures in place to protect land.

New regulations on wildlife markets and the wildlife trade have resulted in another ecological impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, as the virus is thought to have originated in a market (Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market) where live wild and farmed animals were traded (Worobey et al., 2022 ). Markets with live animals, especially those under unregulated and poor sanitary conditions, are an ideal location for pathogens to spread because they contain stressed animals of different species from different locations in stacked and overcrowded cages, all interacting with humans (Aguirre et al., 2020 ). Even with the wildlife bans placed in China after the pandemic started, people have found legal loopholes, as the medicinal use of wildlife—which includes many species such as pangolins, bats and tigers—is not covered by the ban (Wang et al., 2020 ). These species all play unique roles in their ecosystems and impact the PCAs they live in. For instance, bats act as biological and economical pesticides, and are important pollinators and seed dispersers (Zhao, 2020 ). The suggestion that the pandemic started from bats has hurt their reputation and placed them at greater risk for actions such as mass slaughter and removal (Zhao, 2020 ), and it is unclear whether this will be a short or long-term impact.

That is why public education is important for both wildlife and ecosystem conservation (Zhao, 2020 ); it is crucial for the media and other platforms to improve their communication of the relationships between nature, the pandemic and society—misleading narratives can place further pressure on vulnerable ecosystems and species. Messages should be framed with nature as the solution and not the problem, and the impacts of human activities should be highlighted with clear calls to action (Gregg et al., 2021 ). It is important to consider the wildlife trade when discussing PCAs as the animals from this trade could be taken from PCAs, and if another pandemic emerges due to the wildlife trade, PCAs will be at risk again. PCA managers should work with authorities to establish strict legislation against illegally taking species from their premises. In addition, it is important to have strong monitoring and enforcement systems in place, and consider means to avoid their disruption during a future pandemic.

Another group of animals that are at greater risk because of the pandemic are non-human primates such as apes, which are likely to be susceptible to many viruses that impact humans, such as Ebola and the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Melin et al., 2020 ). Primates play a key role in tropical biodiversity, forest regeneration and ecosystem health (Estrada et al., 2017 ). This is because many primates are frugivorous and can disperse seeds over long distances (Chapman et al., 2013 ). Apes that are habituated to humans, such as mountain gorillas, are at an even greater risk—an outbreak could devastate these gorillas and their ecosystem (Gillespie & Leendertz, 2020 ). Therefore, it is recommended that PCA managers add measures to limit or ban contact with great apes (Gillespie & Leendertz, 2020 ) with much greater caution and safety measures in place to protect them.

14.3 Social Impacts and Solutions

In terms of the social impacts, it is important to consider the people that are directly involved with PCAs, such as rangers, local communities and Indigenous peoples. Rangers play a critical role for PCAs as they are on the frontlines protecting these areas from threats including illegal logging and hunting (Singh et al., 2020 ). In some countries, the pandemic resulted in rangers getting fired due to budget reductions from tourism and other funding sources, which adversely affected their livelihoods and reduced protection for the areas they worked in (Hockings et al., 2020 ). These trends contributed to the stress of unemployment, increased anxiety from job insecurity and reduced ranger welfare (Singh et al., 2020 ; Smith et al., 2021 ). As for the rangers who have been working during the pandemic, a study on ranger welfare (Singh et al., 2020 ) revealed that a significant proportion of rangers believed that the pandemic increased threats to PCAs and negatively impacted their life and work—a job that already contained numerous challenges before the pandemic (Belecky et al., 2019 ; Singh et al., 2020 ). This is because rangers were required to work longer hours and spend less time with their families due to staff cuts and increased threats to PCAs (Singh et al., 2020 ). This could be a short-term impact if management measures and policies swiftly improve to support rangers. Therefore, it is recommended that greater emphasis should be placed on their well-being and funding. Additionally, Appleton et al. ( 2022 ) recently found that personnel and ranger numbers are insufficient for global targets such as 30 × 30, which likely plays a major role in current management deficiencies; therefore, it is crucial to keep current staff on board where possible.

In the same survey on rangers (Singh et al., 2020 ), it should be noted that more than four out of five rangers in Asia, Africa and Latin America believe that their job success is dependent on the help of local communities, which were severely impacted by the pandemic. The communities that live near PCAs typically benefit from tourism in some way and rely on it for their livelihoods, such as by receiving a proportion of the PCA fees (Maekawa et al., 2015 ) or from their own businesses; as tourism was heavily impacted by the pandemic, local communities were negatively impacted due to a reduced source of income (Hockings et al., 2020 ). Local communities may also contribute to PCA management, thereby serving as critical stewards for conservation.

Before the pandemic, many local communities were already facing extreme poverty and other challenges including food security and human–wildlife conflict; the pandemic exacerbated these struggles (Bhammar et al., 2021 ). Food security and human–wildlife conflict are important to consider as local communities and Indigenous peoples could be driven to hunting and consuming wild animals, which would not only affect the conservation of certain species and, therefore, impact their surrounding habitats, but could also expose individuals to zoonotic diseases; one example is the Ebola virus outbreak from 2013 to 2016 that originated in Western Africa (Koh et al., 2021 ). These interactions could lead to further problems for health and livelihoods, even though wild meat is an important source of nutrition in rural areas (Friant et al., 2020 ). However, solutions to this should be considered carefully, as other foods could also contribute to threats to PCAs due to habitat loss from land-use change. For instance, communities in the African Congo consume around 5 million tons of wild meat annually—the same amount meat by cattle ranching would require converting up to 25 million hectares of forest into farmland, an area roughly the size of Great Britain (Cooney & Nasi, 2014 ). Since wild meat includes many types of animals, it could be worth improving education on which species are safer and more sustainable to consume.

Another way to support communities local to PCAs is by increasing benefit sharing. Not only can benefit-sharing arrangements increase success for local communities, but they can also help achieve conservation goals (Snyman & Bricker, 2019 ); benefit sharing increases the likelihood that communities will view PCAs positively and conserve their natural resources (Leung et al., 2018 ; Spenceley et al., 2017 ). Examples of benefit sharing include formalising revenue sharing, building capacity and skills, reducing human–wildlife conflict through mitigation or compensation, hiring local individuals for PCA management, increasing local sourcing for goods and offering grants to businesses (Bhammar et al., 2021 ). It is also important to include local communities when developing solutions for them so that they feel more empowered and motivated to protect these areas (Stolton et al., 2021 ).

Along with the local communities residing near PCAs, many PCAs overlap or share limits with Indigenous territories as well. Approximately 50% of Earth’s lands are occupied by Indigenous peoples and local communities, and their lands have less deforestation and lower emissions than other spaces, with substantial biodiversity value (Garnett et al., 2018 ; Sze et al., 2022 ). Therefore, it is important to recognise Indigenous peoples’ rights in these areas and their traditional knowledge systems. Indigenous peoples should be included in decision-making processes for their spaces as well, as they have been historically underrepresented and marginalised in conservation policy decisions (Forest Peoples Programme et al., 2020 ).

Aside from these aspects, the pandemic has also had a much broader social impact on mental health linked to access to natural spaces. Before the pandemic, people went to parks for recreation and education, but during the pandemic, people started visiting national parks and green spaces to maintain their mental and physical well-being (Kleinschroth & Kowarik, 2020 ; Miller-Rushing et al., 2021 ). For example, when restrictions were gradually lifted in European countries in the summer of 2020, visitor numbers increased significantly (McGinlay et al., 2020 ). This phenomenon demonstrates the importance of PCAs for people to manage stress and restore their mental and physical health during (and after) the COVID-19 pandemic (Mandić, 2021 ).

14.4 Economic Impacts and Solutions

The pandemic has had severe economic consequences for PCAs. Tourism is the most common use of PCAs and their largest financial contributor (Mandić, 2021 ; Spenceley et al., 2017 ); it contributes to gross domestic product (GDP), livelihoods, conservation funding (Snyman & Bricker, 2019 ) and benefits local economies in numerous ways: money from tourists contributes to employment and businesses such as restaurants and tour services, which can enable individuals to learn new skills that can be applied to other industries as well (Leung et al., 2018 ). The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) found that the COVID-19 pandemic caused a global loss of 62 million tourism jobs (not specific to PCAs) and $4.9 trillion USD from tourism’s contribution to GDP in 2020, with some improvement in 2021 (WTTC, 2022 ). Historically, terrestrial PCAs received approximately 8 billion visits annually (Balmford et al., 2015 ). The reduction in tourists due to pandemic travel restrictions was particularly severe for places that depend on tourism in Africa and South America (Hockings et al., 2020 ; Spenceley et al., 2021 ; Fig.  14.2 ); monthly surveys of African safari tour operators revealed that over 90% of them had experienced more than 75% fewer bookings or had no bookings at all since April 2020, and the number of bookings still had not fully recovered in their last survey in May 2022, though it did improve (Beekwilder, 2022 ). Therefore, the impacts from this could be considered short to medium term, depending on when there is a full recovery in tourism there.

Funding is already a serious problem for PCAs, which results in poor management and issues with achieving conservation objectives (Bhammar et al., 2021 ). It is estimated that only 20% of PCAs are managed properly, despite their significant importance (Dasgupta, 2021 ). PCAs that are properly managed can advance social development in the form of fair employment, sustainable food production and safe drinking water access (Stolton et al., 2015 ). Therefore, increased funding for PCAs is required to reach societal goals; it is estimated that 140 billion USD annually could protect 30% of terrestrial and marine areas effectively by 2030, which is only 0.16% of the global GDP, and less than one-third of the subsidies provided to activities that harm nature (Waldron et al., 2020 ). Protecting 30% of these areas could generate up to 454 billion USD per year in revenue for four sectors (PAs/nature, agriculture, forestry and fisheries) by 2050, and the avoided-loss value of ecosystem services could be 170–534 billion USD per year by 2050 due to avoided flooding, climate change mitigation, soil loss prevention and storm protection (data based only on mangroves and forests; the value including the other biomes would be higher) (Waldron et al., 2020 ). Thus, the returns could be over seven times greater than the investment needed, including both the avoided loss and the revenue values.

In especially vulnerable regions such as Africa, nearly all PCAs lack proper funding; it is estimated that more than 1 billion USD is required annually to save the iconic species and habitats there (Lindsey et al., 2018 ). Increased funding can improve management effectiveness by hiring and training staff, increasing infrastructure investment and promoting outreach (Bhammar et al., 2021 ). Staff training is particularly important, not only in terms of the policies to effectively manage PCAs, but also in terms of their commercial expertise to ensure that business and financial requirements can be properly addressed (Bhammar et al., 2021 ; Stolton et al., 2021 ). In addition, increased funding would have much wider implications, including lowering the risk of future pandemics. It is estimated that the costs to monitor and prevent disease spillover across a ten-year period would be only two per cent of the estimated costs of the COVID-19 pandemic (Dobson et al., 2020 ). Thus, the benefits for society are estimated to significantly exceed the costs of increasing PCA funding (Waldron et al., 2020 ).

Despite the need for additional funding and regulatory support for PCAs, a recent analysis showed that 16 out of 20 major economies invested in activities that undermined environmental protection measures instead of supporting them, as part of their pandemic recovery efforts (Golden Kroner et al., 2021 ). Additionally, at least 22 countries rolled back or weakened their environmental protection for PCAs or reduced budgets. Rollbacks for PCAs are commonly due to new authorisations for activities such as new industrial plants or housing development, and they have been increasing over the past two decades, including protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) (Golden Kroner et al., 2019 ). These rollbacks have occurred at times when the public cannot be consulted, including during the lockdowns, and the processes to justify PADDD lack rigour compared to those required to create PCAs (Pack et al., 2016 ; Golden Kroner et al., 2021 ). Nonetheless, there are still certain countries that are supporting PCAs during the pandemic; for example, Kenya pledged support for PCAs by promoting tourism, with the employment of 5,500 community scouts ($9.2 million USD) and 160 community conservancies ($9.2 million USD). Additionally, Pakistan created a Green Stimulus Initiative, which includes plans to expand PAs and add 15 national parks that cover 7,300 km 2 (supported with $24 million USD), create Pakistan’s first National Parks Service, and around 5,000 new jobs (Golden Kroner et al., 2021 ).

Even though tourism will remain important for PCAs, it is important to reduce over-reliance on this sector and build resilience for PCAs. Therefore, more diverse and sustainable financing sources such as a combination of conservation trust funds, impact bonds and payments for ecosystem services are required in case one or more methods fail, especially in emergency situations such as the pandemic (Bhammar et al., 2021 ; Spenceley et al., 2021 ; Stolton et al., 2021 ). Another type of funding support is through official development assistance (ODA), defined as government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries, which has proven to be a key resource in past emergencies and could be critical for protecting biodiversity-vulnerable nations (OECD, 2020 ). Additionally, subsidies that harm biodiversity and the environment, such as those for agriculture and fisheries, should be redirected to environmental conservation, including PCAs (Golden Kroner, 2021 ).

A promising approach to improve economic development linked to PCAs is through a collaborative relationship between communities, PCA managers and businesses (Stolton et al., 2021 ). Public–private partnerships (PPPs) and collaborative management partnerships (CMPs) between authoritative bodies, such as governments, and NGOs or other private bodies, have also shown to be effective tools for PCA management that have led to greater funding from increased donor confidence (Lindsey et al., 2021 ). It should be noted that each PCA exists in its own context and requires tailored approaches to increase economic development in its region (Stolton et al., 2021 ). In times of limited funding, resources should be maintained to continue to support staff to monitor and enforce protection and restoration, especially in places with high biodiversity and intact forests (Golden Kroner et al., 2021 ).

14.5 Regional Differences

It is clear that there were regional differences in the ecological, social and economic impacts of the pandemic on PCAs; Waithaka et al. ( 2021 ) found that, broadly, PCAs in wealthier nations have been able to manage the situation better than those in poorer nations. More specifically, the least affected regions were Europe, Oceania and North America, whereas the most severely affected PCAs were in Latin America and Africa. Eastern and Southern Africa were the most affected, and PCAs in Asia were moderately affected (Waithaka et al., 2021 ). However, this could also be due to underreporting from parts of Southeast and Central Asia. Based on the findings of Waithaka et al. ( 2021 ) and Hockings et al. ( 2020 ), the regions that appear to need the most immediate assistance are Latin America and Africa. Therefore, plans to help these regions should be prioritised.

These regions can be supported by increasing diverse sources of funding for resources and technology to support online platforms and remote work, as well as training and capacity building, as many countries lacked those; in particular, over 80% of the countries from Africa surveyed (Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland and Uganda) indicated that their ability to cope with the pandemic was most affected by insufficient funding (Waithaka et al., 2021), which is why this aspect is especially important. In addition, emergency response guidelines and contingency plans need to be improved upon, which applies to all PCAs worldwide.

14.6 Green List Guidance in the Recovery of PCAs

One way that PCAs can begin to recover effectively from the pandemic is by using the Green List (IUCN & WCPA, 2017). The Green Listing mechanism enables PCAs to evaluate their challenges and bottlenecks and take corrective measures to remove impediments by fulfilling the criteria and components of the Green List framework. Combatting the impacts of COVID-19 on PCAs involves not only the elimination of high-risk factors, but also the adoption of ecological, social, economic safeguards. The Green List process validates and allows a monitoring mechanism for conservation efforts undertaken in areas and sites afflicted with high ecological, social and economic risks (Wells et al., 2016 ). There are four components in the Green List: Good Governance, Sound Design and Planning, Effective Management and Successful Conservation Outcomes, all of which can help improve the way PCAs are managed and enhance their contributions to conservation.

The Good Governance component within the Green List framework is the foundation towards building ecological, social and economic recovery pathways for PCAs. This component guarantees legitimacy and voice (criterion 1.1), achieving transparency and accountability (1.2), and enabling governance vitality and capacity to respond adaptively (1.3). The Effective Management component is also crucial when discussing PCA management; this component has seven criteria that include: developing and implementing a long-term management strategy (criterion 3.1), managing ecological condition (3.2), managing within the social and economic context of the site (3.3), managing threats (3.4), effectively and fairly enforcing laws and regulations (3.5), managing access, resource use and visitation (3.6), and measuring success (3.7). These, followed by the other two components, can enable successful conservation in PCAs and provide an international benchmark for quality that motivates improved performance and helps catalyse ecological, social and economic recovery in a global network of PCAs, as well as their revitalisation and expansion. Ensuring better safeguards in the future for PCAs through the robust Green List mechanisms and rebuilding sites could benefit both people and nature (Hockings et al., 2019 ; Wells et al., 2016 ).

14.7 Lessons Learned and Recommendations

It is critical that action is taken to safeguard PCAs, given their ecological, social and economic importance. The COVID-19 pandemic affected all three of these aspects of PCAs negatively in many parts of the world. Therefore, policies and management decisions to support PCAs and their rebuilding from COVID-19 are crucial and will have far greater implications beyond specific sites, such as supporting biodiversity, mitigating climate change, enhancing human health and supporting the economy (Kumar, 2010 ). It is important to consider a holistic ‘One Health’ approach (Osofsky et al., 2005 ) to PCA governance and management, which would require collaboration among experts from different fields, including human, animal and environmental health, to design and implement actions, policies and legislation that reflect research in this field (McNeely, 2021 ). It would also be beneficial for PCAs to consider using the Green List as a tool to help recover effectively (Hockings et al., 2019 ). Therefore, to summarise the key recommendations that were mentioned throughout this chapter, categorised as responses to the ecological, social and economic impacts of COVID-19 on PCAs:

14.7.1 Responses to Address the Ecological Impacts:

PCAs should be governed and managed effectively, supported by adequate regulations, institutions and funding, using a One Health approach. This approach could involve partnerships across sectors to monitor zoonotic diseases around PCAs and bans of certain visitor interactions with animals around PCAs, especially vulnerable species like great apes or those considered high risk, to reduce the chances of spillover. Tools including the IUCN Green List can support monitoring and encourage improvements to governance and management.

Legal protection measures, regulations and management to prevent illegal logging, poaching and wildlife being taken from PCAs (e.g. for live animal markets) must be strengthened; this will require the development of effective legislation and investment into management personnel and surveillance equipment. Community-led monitoring may also support this effort.

Habitat restoration and connectivity efforts should be intensified due to the increased deforestation during the pandemic, as well as the land-use change from intensive agriculture. Regions with the most land-use change should be prioritised. This will also help build ecological resilience and help prevent future pandemics.

14.7.2 Responses to Address the Social Impacts:

Working conditions for rangers and PCA staff should be improved, including humane policies (e.g. fair working hours). PCAs should try to retain as many staff members as possible, even during emergency situations like pandemics to prevent illegal activities in PCAs from increasing.

Benefit sharing should be increased for local communities by formalising revenue sharing in the law and creating more requirements to hire local staff in PCAs.

Indigenous peoples and local communities should be included in decision-making processes for PCAs that overlap with their territories for more inclusive governance. Their rights and Indigenous knowledge systems should also be respected more, with measures in place to uphold these.

14.7.3 Responses to Address the Economic Impacts:

Sustainable and diverse financing mechanisms should be in place, and emergency funds and ODA mechanisms should be created for PCAs that are heavily dependent on tourism, including those in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia where tourism plays an integral role. Budget rollbacks that affect PCAs should also be avoided where possible.

A significant amount of funding needs to be provided to PCAs in Africa and Latin America to protect their unique and especially vulnerable wildlife and habitats, which should be prioritised based on the severe impacts the pandemic has had there.

There should be an annual investment from various sources of at least 140 billion USD into PCAs worldwide, as this could protect 30% of terrestrial and marine areas effectively by 2030, and the returns could be over seven times higher (including the projected revenues and avoided-loss values of $454 billion and $534 billion USD, respectively; Waldron et al., 2020 ).

Based on the ecological, social and economic impacts highlighted in this chapter, it is clear that each aspect plays a prominent role in the future of PCAs in different ways, and different management approaches should be taken to address each. Global policies, funding mechanisms and management plans should prioritise the more vulnerable regions first, namely, Latin America and Africa, to ensure that they receive adequate support to help their wildlife, communities and economies recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Sharma, M., Ferreira, M.N., Golden Kroner, R., Pasha, M.K.S. (2024). Impacts and Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic for Protected and Conserved Area Management. In: Finneran, N., Hewlett, D., Clarke, R. (eds) Managing Protected Areas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40783-3_14

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COVID-19 and protected areas: Impacts, conflicts, and possible management solutions

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During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, management authorities of numerous Protected Areas (PAs) had to discourage visitors from accessing them in order to reduce the virus transmission rate and protect local communities. This resulted in social–ecological impacts and added another layer of complexity to managing PAs. This paper presents the results of a survey in Snowdonia National Park capturing the views of over 700 local residents on the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions and possible scenarios and tools for managing tourist numbers. Lower visitor numbers were seen in a broadly positive way by a significant number of respondents while benefit sharing issues from tourism also emerged. Most preferred options to manage overcrowding were restricting access to certain paths, the development of mobile applications to alert people to overcrowding and reporting irresponsible behavior. Our findings are useful for PA managers and local communities currently developing post-COVID-19 recovery strategies.

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• Management Solutions Keyphrases 100%
• COVID-19 Keyphrases 100%
• Protected Areas Keyphrases 100%
• Local Community Computer Science 100%
• Communities Social Sciences 66%
• Overcrowding Social Sciences 66%
• Mobile Application Computer Science 50%
• Transmission Rate Computer Science 50%

T1 - COVID-19 and protected areas

T2 - Impacts, conflicts, and possible management solutions

AU - Jones, Nikoleta

AU - McGinlay, James

AU - Jones, Angela

AU - Malesios, Chrisovalantis

AU - Holtvoeth, Jens

AU - Dimitrakopoulos, Panayiotis G.

AU - Gkoumas, Vassilis

AU - Kontoleon, Andreas

N1 - Funding Information: Research presented in this paper has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research programme (Project FIDELIO, grant agreement no. 802605) ( https://www.fidelio.landecon.cam.ac.uk ). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals LLC

PY - 2021/4/6

Y1 - 2021/4/6

N2 - During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, management authorities of numerous Protected Areas (PAs) had to discourage visitors from accessing them in order to reduce the virus transmission rate and protect local communities. This resulted in social–ecological impacts and added another layer of complexity to managing PAs. This paper presents the results of a survey in Snowdonia National Park capturing the views of over 700 local residents on the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions and possible scenarios and tools for managing tourist numbers. Lower visitor numbers were seen in a broadly positive way by a significant number of respondents while benefit sharing issues from tourism also emerged. Most preferred options to manage overcrowding were restricting access to certain paths, the development of mobile applications to alert people to overcrowding and reporting irresponsible behavior. Our findings are useful for PA managers and local communities currently developing post-COVID-19 recovery strategies.

AB - During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, management authorities of numerous Protected Areas (PAs) had to discourage visitors from accessing them in order to reduce the virus transmission rate and protect local communities. This resulted in social–ecological impacts and added another layer of complexity to managing PAs. This paper presents the results of a survey in Snowdonia National Park capturing the views of over 700 local residents on the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions and possible scenarios and tools for managing tourist numbers. Lower visitor numbers were seen in a broadly positive way by a significant number of respondents while benefit sharing issues from tourism also emerged. Most preferred options to manage overcrowding were restricting access to certain paths, the development of mobile applications to alert people to overcrowding and reporting irresponsible behavior. Our findings are useful for PA managers and local communities currently developing post-COVID-19 recovery strategies.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103577396&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1111/conl.12800

DO - 10.1111/conl.12800

M3 - Letter

AN - SCOPUS:85103577396

SN - 1755-263X

JO - Conservation Letters

JF - Conservation Letters

M1 - e12800

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

Conservation International's science is the foundation for all our work . Our global science team is dedicated to advancing conservation science — pursuing actionable knowledge and amplifying it through partnerships and outreach.

To date, Conservation International has published more than 1,300 peer-reviewed articles , many in leading journals including Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here is an archive of our most recent research:

COVID-era policies and economic recovery plans: are governments building back better for protected and conserved areas?

Rachel golden kroner, edward b. barbier, olivier chassot, sunita chaudhary, lorenzo cordova jr, annabelle cruz-trinidad, tracey cumming, jennifer howard, charlotte karibuhoye said, zoltan kun, angelique ogena, florence palla, rodrigo samayoa valiente, sebastian troëng, allan valverde, ramitha wijethunga and michael wong, parks, 27, 135–148.

March 11, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a major impact on conservation policies and practice at multiple scales, including protected and conserved areas (PCAs). There is a need to understand the implications for PCAs of recent actions, enacted or promoted in the wake of COVID-19. To fill this knowledge gap, we reviewed economic stimulus packages and other government policies that were implemented or advanced between January and October 2020. We identified positive examples of support for PCAs in economic recovery packages (in 17 countries) and instances where commitments made before 2020 to scale up environmental protections were advanced (in 22 countries), but also rollbacks of protection measures (64 cases in 22 countries). On balance, post-COVID economic stimulus packages and policies to date have undermined more than supported environmental protections, including for PCAs; rollbacks may have long-term consequences where they authorise damaging infrastructure or undermine Indigenous rights. We suggest priority actions for a green economic recovery that include putting PCAs at the centre of such efforts, helping ensure the long-term prosperity of people and our planet.

Golden Kroner, R., Barbier, E. B., Chassot, O., Chaudhary, S., Cordova Jr, L., Cruz-Trinidad, A., Cumming, T., Howard, J., Karibuhoye Said, C., Kun, Z., Ogena, A., Palla, F., Samayoa Valiente, R., Troëng, S., Valverde, A., Wijethunga, R., & Wong, M. (2021). COVID-era policies and economic recovery plans: are governments building back better for protected and conserved areas? PARKS, 27, 135–148. https://doi.org/10.2305/iucn.ch.2021.parks-27-sirgk.en

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Understanding the changing role of global public health in biodiversity conservation

Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Building C, Level 1, Burwood, Victoria, 3125 Australia

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Zoonotic disease emergence has become a core concern of biodiversity conservation amid the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Major international conservation groups now comprehensively center larger human–nature imbalances not only as problems of global public health but as a core challenge of the conservation movement, alongside habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and climate change. There is, however, little consideration of how new biosecurity concerns might alter conservation practice with unexpected and potential harmful impacts on human communities, particularly in developing nations with significant human–wildlife interfaces. Reviewing emerging policy positions from key conservation organizations, this article argues that the proposed responses to the COVID-19 pandemic hold the potential to (a) amplify existing people-park conflicts, and (b) generate new tensions by integrating global systems of viral surveillance into biodiversity conservation. I conclude that the close integration of biosecurity concerns into conservation policies requires greater acknowledgment of the unique challenges for human communities.

Supplementary Information

The online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-021-01576-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Introduction

The relationship between global public health and conservation has changed dramatically over the course of 2020 and 2021. In large part, the growing convergence of these two concerns has emerged from the proposed origin of SARS-Cov-2 and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic in wildlife sold in the wet markets of Wuhan. This scrutiny has focused on bats and pangolins, both known reservoirs of coronaviruses, and has alerted global publics to the extensive and illegal international trade in endangered animals as a site of potential “viral spillover” to humans. However, beyond a specific focus on the role of the illegal wildlife trade, scientists, media commentators and environmental activists have been quick to suggest that blame for the emergence of zoonotic diseases lies not just in wildlife trading but in environmental destruction more broadly. This includes changing climate, deforestation and intensification of agriculture and livestock production (Schmeller et al. 2020 ; Wu 2021 ).

In response to the growing awareness of the relationship between environmental and human health, “biosecurity”—broadly, the management of harmful organisms—has become a pervasive feature of global conservation discourse, occupying an equal role alongside existential challenges of habitat destruction and climate change. In a striking example of this trend, the Wildlife Conservation Society, a longtime advocate for linking environmental and human health, elevated zoonotic diseases to a central conservation crisis in a statement to the new United States administration following the inauguration of President Joe Biden in January of 2021. The statement emphasized that “the United States needs to reengage in advancing environmental and conservation solutions as the world faces existential crises all caused by humankind: the loss of biodiversity, climate change, and the threat of pandemic disease”. This is not an isolated perspective. Global public health is now a central, rather than peripheral, problem of biodiversity conservation. 1

As this article demonstrates, there is an emerging and powerful consensus among scholars and practitioners that preventing future pandemics will require expansive and transformed environmental safeguards and a close integration of biodiversity conservation and global public health strategies. The language of conservation groups, in particular, has changed comprehensively over the course of 2020 and 2021 in response to heightened public awareness of zoonoses and intense governmental concern surrounding future viral pandemics linked to environmental change. This article is based on a review of the statements, policy briefings and reports produced by globally or regionally significant terrestrial conservation organizations that are concerned with the illegal wildlife trade, wildlife conservation or biodiversity conservation more broadly. Surveying these emerging responses demonstrates that the global conservation movement has quickly and collectively capitalized on public concern surrounding zoonotic diseases, and adopted positions that explicitly link the environment and zoonoses, resulting in what has been described by leading environmentalists as a “remarkable consensus among conservation groups about the future of the planet” (Conservation International 2020 ).

However, while COVID-19 has prompted considerable discussion around the future of conservation practice—in terms of economic viability and the ability to sustain ecosystems in the context of diminished enforcement (McElwee et al. 2020 ; Roe et al. 2020 ; Cawthorn et al. 2021 )—there has been little consideration of how “biosecurity” concerns might distinctly alter the work of environmental protection and with what implications for communities who co-mingle with wildlife. The article identifies two emergent challenges. First, the potential emergence of zoonotic diseases has been used to draw attention toward existing mechanisms of environmental protection, specifically protected area expansion and more punitive action toward actors in the wildlife trade. This amplification may promote harsh and restrictive approaches to protected area management and further stigmatize the often-complex wildlife use of poor, rural peoples. This is a scenario borne out by tentative government responses, particularly in Southeast Asia, that include blanket bans on non-timber forest product trading and the more punitive measures targeting wildlife traders as solutions to zoonoses. Secondly, concern surrounding zoonosis has led to widespread calls from scholars and conservation practitioners to integrate viral surveillance into protected area design as part of a global system of pathogen monitoring. In addition to passive symptom monitoring of humans who reside at the human–wildlife interface, this has included a widespread renewal of longstanding calls for routine genetic sampling of humans and animals for emerging diseases at sites deemed to be at high-risk of viral spillover. However, these techniques may raise new tensions in an already fraught governance space, often marred by low levels of trust and historical, ongoing in certain areas, animosity surrounding conservation measures.

The high human and environmental costs of COVID-19 have provided a clear and compelling justification for these measures in the name of future pandemic prevention. The enthusiastic and widespread integration of human biosecurity concerns into environmental protection warrants careful investigation, and close regulation, to avoid deepening existing conflicts between communities and conservation goals.

How have biosecurity concerns entered into conservation practice?

Biosecurity is, to varying degrees around the world, an existing feature of environmental governance concerned with the management of animal and plant diseases. Most prominently, “One Health” approaches emerging in the early 2000s have been jointly adopted as a guiding concept with varying levels of application by multilateral groups (e.g., the World Health Organization, World Organization for Animal Health and the Food and Agriculture Organization). One Health, a concept rooted in understanding links between environmental and human health, has led to several significant national and international projects of viral surveillance and management (e.g., USAID PREDICT, the EU-funded ANTIGONE). However, until recently One Health and related approaches had not garnered significant public recognition or policy traction strictly as an issue of conservation. While nominally “cross-sectoral”, the majority of existing One Health research activities and projects focus on preserving the economic viability of commercial intensive agriculture or livestock production (Hinchliffe 2015 ; Porter 2019 ), with little integration of traditional biodiversity conservation concerns, such as habitat preservation or protected area management. 2 Though several prominent environmental organizations have championed or nominally adopted One Health approaches over the past two decades (Gruetzmacher et al. 2021 ), concerns around viral spillover from wild animal populations and broader connections between environmental and human health have, until recently, been similarly marginal to public outreach and communications strategy, policy design and practice.

Throughout 2020–2021, the problem of zoonoses and issues of global public health have become a pervasive feature of communication to publics and proposed policy as a “third pillar” of challenges facing the conservation movement, alongside biodiversity loss and climate change. These transformations have been prompted by the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in early 2020 and, in particular, the proposed origin of the SARS-Cov-2 virus in illegally traded wildlife. By April of 2020, key international environmental organizations had issued formal statements or press releases that explicitly adopted a position on the emergence of COVID-19, all of which linked human health to environmental health and argued for enhanced conservation measures (Electronic Supplementary Material 1 ). In May of 2020, a group of scholars and conservation practitioners published an editorial essay in the IUCN-run journal PARKS that outlined the emerging impact of the pandemic on protected areas in terms of enforcement and encroachment, and articulated the need for a “new and transformative relationship with nature” as a means to prevent future viral spillover (Hockings et al. 2020 , p. 14). In pragmatic terms, the authors suggested the need to adopt a One Health approach within future conservation practice, and within this larger approach, highlighted the specific need to establish “a global One Health system of wildlife monitoring and surveillance that includes population status, interactions with humans, and potential for identifying infectious diseases as they emerge and before they become costly global pandemics” (McNeely 2021 ). By mid-2020, many large organizations had released significant reports that expanded on the earlier initial policy statements or briefs.

These reports provided more comprehensive overarching responses to the pandemic crisis, and in many cases provided specific policies. Many of the initial statements and reports that were released over the course of 2020 were collated into the “Wildlife Conservation 20 Declaration” released on the 20 November 2020, ahead of the online G20 summit. This declaration from prominent global wildlife conservation groups mapped out an expansive vision for preventing future pandemics that linked human and environmental health.

Surveying the policy framing and transformed agendas of major international and regional conservation groups, these responses fall into three broad categories (Fig.  1 ). The responses were not mutually exclusive, and often overlapped. The first response emphasizes the role of the illegal wildlife trade and other forms of wildlife exploitation (e.g., “bushmeat” consumption) in the creation of conditions conducive to viral spillover. Unsurprisingly, this is a response generated by groups that are focused on the elimination of the illegal wildlife trade in general (e.g., TRAFFIC) or organizations that are dedicated to the preservation of a particular animal or group of animals at risk from illegal trading (e.g., African Wildlife Foundation). At the same time, these groups often explicitly emphasized that the blame for emerging zoonoses should not be placed simply on the existence of wildlife or human proximity to wildlife, in order to not stigmatize particular species known to be viral reservoirs.

Summary of conservation responses to COVID-19

The second response located the emergence of COVID-19 in humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with the non-human world in a larger sense, pointing not only to the illegal wildlife trade or wildlife exploitation but other forms of environmental destruction that generate closer and potentially riskier human–wildlife interaction. This includes development in tropical forests (logging, agricultural expansion and intensification, resource extraction), changing demography at forest– interfaces and accelerating industrial animal production. Conservation International’s Chief Executive Officer emphasized, for example, that while the pandemic offers a unique opportunity to end the illegal wildlife trade, which is a key site of viral spillover, “the real driver behind disease is deforestation”. Or, as a report released by the World Wide Fund for Nature in June (2020) explained, zoonotic disease emergence is driven by “humanity’s broken relationship with nature”. The solution, in this framing, was to emphasize the need to reconfigure broader human–environmental interaction. This transformative vision was often translated into: (a) the need to better support existing conservation mechanisms, such as protected areas or environmental regulations; and (b) adopt new ways of doing conservation that acknowledge links between environmental and human health.

The third response points not only to the origins of COVID-19 in wildlife, but to the disruptive impact of the pandemic on enforcement and rehabilitation activities, diminished philanthropic funding and tourism revenue and increased poverty leading to greater environmental exploitation (e.g., more engagement in the illegal wildlife trade or illegal logging) (Lindsey et al. 2020 ; Smith et al. 2021 ).

Implications in the context of contemporary conservation debates

Conservation efforts have complex human impacts, particularly in developing nations with large, resource-dependent rural populations and rapidly developing forest–farm frontiers—precisely the areas identified as potential “hotspots” for zoonotic disease emergence (Dobson et al. 2020 ). There is a significant body of literature focused on the social impacts of protected areas, but evidence broadly suggests that there are highly “contrary” impacts for human livelihoods near or within protected areas (West and Brockington 2006 ; Agrawal and Redford 2009 ; Holmes and Cavanagh 2016 ). The denial of access to resources or displacement may deepen poverty, for example, but support schemes may generate new sources of cash income (Brockington and Wilkie 2015 ). Beyond issues of access, many conservation projects, especially those branded as a community-based, require the intensive transformation of community values and aspirations to produce desirable environmental behavior in the form of new livelihood activities (Dressler 2014 ; Bluwstein 2017 ). Making matters even more complex, even when there are no direct measures to transform attitudes or deny access, many communities will also strategically conform to global or national expectations in order to maintain access to the support of civil society or international conservation groups (Brosius et al. 1998 ). Putting aside the still-unresolved debates that weigh costs and benefits across human and environmental outcomes of these various approaches, this social science scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that conservation schemes can have, for better or worse, profound impacts on where people live, how they sustain their households and how they relate to the non-human world.

Given these far-reaching impacts, any tentative shifts in the rationale and logic of global conservation objectives has direct implications for human lives and livelihoods and, therefore, should warrant close consideration for potential effects on policy and practice. The recent foregrounding of global public health as a foundational justification for environmental protection entails a potentially significant transformation in how and why biodiversity conservation should be achieved. A comparable example is the integration of climate change as a key objective of the environmental movement. Climate change has provided not only a compelling justification for habitat protection but spawned a global governance agenda that directly links financial markets in developed nations to the local livelihood practices of the rural poor throughout the world, for example, through the United Nations’ controversial but wide-reaching Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation or REDD + program (Milne et al. 2019 ). In light of the growing conversations between conservation groups and key development funders to design a new international environmental protection regime, 3 there is a need to carefully evaluate what these changes will be and how they might impact existing conservation efforts. In the context of longstanding and well understand human impacts and social challenges surrounding environmental protection, I suggest there are two threads of concern.

Amplifying existing conservation tensions

The perceived urgent need to prevent future pandemics derived from zoonotic diseases has been used to support calls for greater environmental protection and, specifically, the pandemic has been used by scholars and conservationists to support the call for a rapid increase in the scope and size of protected areas (Hockings et al. 2020 ; McNeely 2021 ). However, the urgency of these concerns risks amplifying existing tensions in conservation practice surrounding the impact of protected areas and other environmental protection tools. These concerns have already been noted in various ways by others (Dobson et al. 2020 ; Roe et al. 2020 ; Cawthorn et al. 2021 ; Walters et al. 2021 ), but they warrant briefly summarizing: the vast economic and social costs associated with pandemics and the emerging responses by state resource managements suggest there is a risk that efforts to prevent zoonotic disease emergence will provide a compelling and widely accepted justification for harsher environmental policies. Concern over infectious diseases may support arguments for neo-protectionist forms of conservation that can maintain strict boundaries between humans and the environment. That is, policy makers and publics globally may be willing to tolerate harm to people or animals in order to prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases.

These concerns are particularly pronounced in terms of wildlife conservation. The link between COVID-19 and animal viral reservoirs has already prompted culling of animals deemed to pose a threat to humans and, historically, the framing of certain species as sites of viral spillover have resulted in spontaneous and sometimes illegal mass culling events (López-Baucells et al. 2018 ). In some areas, threat of a potential spillover event from wildlife, hunted for example for subsistence purposes, may be used as further justification for the removal of rural populations from ancestral territories or to bolster limitations on local wildlife use, as occurred during Ebola outbreaks across West Africa (Bonwitt et al. 2018 ).

Similarly, calls by scholars and conservation practitioners to enforce a blanket ban on wildlife consumption, with little differentiation between the rural poor and elite urban consumers (Yang et al. 2020 ), risks severely impacting communities that rely on the consumption of animals for food security (Roe et al. 2020 ). Community-based approaches to combatting the trade have only recently gained traction, which remains dominated by militarized responses that foster violence, meaning that gains for less punitive approaches are fragile (Cooney et al. 2017 ). While there has been some emphasis on the need to protect indigenous and local livelihoods in conservation responses to COVID-19 (Dobson et al. 2020 ), tentative state responses to the pandemic bear out the risk of punitive approaches becoming more prevalent. The proposed link between the illegal wildlife trade and zoonotic diseases has prompted quick and expansive responses from many governments, particularly in China and the Southeast Asian region, resulting in focused police attention on the trade, wildlife importation bans and punitive responses to wildlife exploitation. In the Philippines, for example, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources quickly banned the transportation of all non-timber forest products (a key source of livelihood support for indigenous and rural communities) as a precautionary measure (DENR 2020 ) and concern surrounding future pandemics has led to pending legislation entailing greatly expanded prison terms (up to 20 years) for harming endangered wildlife (Mercado 2020 ).

New goals and unpredictable outcomes

In addition to amplifying existing arguments for strict conservation regimes that exclude humans and more militarized solutions to wildlife exploitation, there are growing calls to incorporate One Health and biosecurity tools as routine features of conservation practice. While One Health and related approaches constitute a fairly expansive vision for pandemic prevention (Gruetzmacher et al. 2021 ), these proposals have centrally called for the development of biosurveillance in the form of “integrated monitoring systems for early detection of, and response to, emerging infectious diseases events” (Hockings et al. 2020 , p. 18). This includes the expansion of passive event monitoring to include certain high-risk human communities and animal populations (i.e., at human–wildlife interfaces) who act as “sentinels” of potentially dangerous infectious diseases. Monitoring for clusters of symptoms might allow for quick identification of emerging infectious diseases and action that can prevent spread to more densely populated areas or spillover into domestic animal populations. Increasingly, however, biosurveillance projects employ anticipatory and routine sampling of human and animal populations for potentially dangerous pathogens. This involves widespread forms of molecular analysis of genetic samples from at-risk populations (e.g., close human residence to tropical forests or regular known interaction with wild animals known to be disease reservoirs). Genomic analysis has become a proven technology in mapping the spread and origins of recent viral outbreaks, particularly in the Ebola, Zika and COVID-19 outbreaks. Viral monitoring programs targeting various dimensions of the human–wildlife interface are not unprecedented, and there have been several significant projects of global viral surveillance, such as USAID’s decade-long PREDICT program and the emerging Global Virome Project.

However, the integration of biosurveillance of humans and animals into conservation raises new and unpredictable points of tension in an already fraught space of negotiation between state environmental managers and rural communities living within or adjacent to protected areas. Virologists and others concerned with zoonotic diseases have long argued for a globalized system of early warning targeting vulnerable peoples “with high levels of exposure to wild animals, such as hunters, butchers of wild game, wildlife veterinarians, workers in the wildlife trade…” (Wolfe, Dunavan and Diamond 2007 , p. 283; Keutsch et al. 2010 ; Gardy and Loman 2018 ). Scaling up these techniques into a system of continuous and global surveillance within protected areas, as now widely emphasized as a response to COVID-19 (Dobson et al. 2020 ), may prove particularly challenging given that: (a) the most at-risk communities are also those most likely to have experienced deprivation resulting from conservation practices or are reliant on criminalized livelihood activities; and (b) any such project is strongly dependent on local compliance and cooperation with those who are envisioned to be prospective partners in disease monitoring (Bird and Mazet 2018 ).

In light of historical conflicts around monitoring and surveillance in conservation, there are three key points of tension. First, there is already considerable distrust surrounding the surveillance of resource use by non-governmental and state actors, particularly in tropical forests identified as most at risk of spillover events. Even in settings where community-based conservation has become the norm, the illegal access and use of resources is frequently managed through punitive punishment. Monitoring resource access has taken the form of patrols by, for example, park rangers and project officers or in-community enforcement mechanisms. More recently, the growing use of low-cost drones, in addition to other increasingly affordable sensing technologies, has further fueled suspicions in many communities toward conservation efforts (Sandbrook 2015 ). Similarly, existing efforts to track and monitor wildlife for other reasons have been challenged by communities as invasive (Sandbrook et al. 2018 ; Sharma et al. 2020 ). Given that existing viral monitoring aims to elicit detailed information regarding rural households, their livelihood activities and potentially illegal use of wildlife (e.g., Smiley Evans et al., 2018 ), it is likely that biosurveillance would exacerbate any existing tensions around privacy and resource use.

Second, the medical sampling of humans, particularly indigenous peoples, but also many marginalized rural populations, has a long and fraught history and has produced, in many cases, high levels of distrust in public health institutions and agents (Kowal and Radin 2015 ). A lack of sewage systems to conduct community-level monitoring of viral presence in most remote areas means genetic material would need to be regularly collected from vulnerable populations living near high-risk areas at the individual level. Indeed, the existing literature that examines One Health approaches notes this as a potential source of concern, with scholars emphasizing that there are considerable ethical issues surrounding storage of human genetic material and the need for considerable trust-building at the local level (Lajaunie et al. 2014 ; Bird and Mazet 2018 ). In light of these existing concerns, it is likely that efforts to collect sensitive livelihood data, personal medical information and genetic material, in addition to greater scientific access and control of locally valued wildlife, will require careful negotiation.

Finally, in addition to issues confronting human sampling, there is a growing awareness in many forest communities that the collection of plant and animal material is closely connected to biopiracy (Mgbeoji 2014 ). Indeed, existing viral monitoring programs face considerable challenges surrounding issues of intellectual property and the potentially uneven distribution of benefits derived from identifying particularly dangerous zoonotic diseases. Geopolitical questions over who owns viruses and who can and should benefit from commercial vaccine development remain definitively unanswered by global regulatory frameworks (Porter 2019 ). Indigenous peoples therefore face the prospect of having what is now considered to be a significant biological resource (i.e., potentially dangerous pathogens) appropriated by a global public health regime that works to benefit, primarily, wealthy developed nations and their pharmaceutical industries (Richardson 2020 ).

The precise impacts of these programs are difficult to predict with certainty, most significantly because One Health and related approaches have not matured into a consistent model of governing human–environmental interactions. There is an emerging consideration of how social science approaches might aid One Health applications, but little exploration of the social, cultural and political challenges and impacts that arise from One Health projects, such the USAID PREDICT program. Nevertheless, the challenges of these transformations have not been unrecognized. Proposals to integrate One Health approaches or greatly expand protected area size have reiterated existing commitments to the rights of local resource users (Dobson et al. 2020 ; Hockings et al. 2020 , p. 18; Walters et al. 2021 ). The WC20 Declaration (2020), for example, explicitly emphasizes that G20 states “need to respect the rights, and enhance the livelihoods and well-being of IPLCs [Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities] living within and/or depending on natural ecosystems” in the formulation and enactment of wildlife protection policy and programs. However, the statement presents a somewhat optimistic scenario in which targeted communities will easily or readily “define and participate in wildlife guardianship” or submit to forms of new and invasive biosurveillance. The recent history of conservation—and wildlife conservation in particular—suggests that local ideas of guardianship can differ, quite radically, from those envisioned by environmental groups. There is little recognition, perhaps to avoid risking stigmatizing already marginalized people, of the deep economic reliance of many potential “wildlife guardians” on the illegal wildlife trade (Smith 2020 ; Smith and Theriault 2020 ). Following existing community-based wildlife conservation programs, there is also little focus placed on unpicking these complex and ethically challenging dependencies beyond seeking to provide alternative livelihoods. Indeed, purported efforts to safeguard the rights of local peoples repeats older, and arguably ineffective, strategies with little consideration of the distinct and unpredictable effects of integrating biosecurity tools and strategies into conservation practice.

A powerful consensus among global conservation organizations and multilateral institutions has emerged in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For the foreseeable future, it is likely that many environmental groups will continue to leverage perceived links between wildlife exploitation, and environmental destruction more generally, and zoonotic diseases in advocacy and policy design. What this might entail has yet to emerge in a concrete form, but both scholars and conservation practitioners have promoted both: (a) the extension of existing conservation mechanisms (e.g., greater or new sources of funding, more protected areas); and (b) the incorporation of biosecurity technologies and strategies into traditional biodiversity conservation. The potential impacts of the former are likely to be relatively straightforward. If the existing tensions surrounding people–park conflicts are not addressed, more protected areas may amplify social conflicts already in place. More protected areas could very conceivable lead to, for example, greater human displacement and the need to provide new and sustainable livelihoods to large groups of people. In the latter case, however, the introduction of novel technologies, goals and justifications for environmental protection makes the prediction of likely social impacts challenging, particularly given that the construction of a global system of zoonoses management is dependent on genetic screening or intensive symptom monitoring of both humans and animals. The history of conservation practice suggests that these are unlikely to be adopted readily and will require sustained information dissemination and education campaigns.

There are two key recommendations emerging from these insights. First, there is clearly a dearth of research surrounding the social conflict involved in issues of biosurveillance. Beyond a lack of data resulting from the relative novelty of viral monitoring on a large scale, this indicates a troubling belief that fairly invasive management tools can be readily inserted into an already conflict-ridden sector. Rigorous social research, attuned to historical and ongoing conflicts in conservation, as these projects unfold may help mitigate new tensions as or before they arise. Second, the little research that does exist surrounding One Health projects points to a need for a regulatory framework that addresses the ethical concerns surrounding the collection and storage of human and animal genetic material on a vast scale, as well as issues of privacy in the collection of medical and livelihood data. While in many developed nations genetic material is protected by fairly robust systems of regulation, this is not the case across the developing tropical world where biosurveillance will largely target vulnerable communities whose rights are still subverted and poorly upheld by legal systems. Varied national responses to biopiracy concerns suggest there is a global desire and capacity to protect the rights of forest-dwelling communities, for example, but relying on processes of country-level legislative responses has produced an uneven international regulatory landscape. The current and broad consensus by conservation groups and policy makers indicates there is a significant opportunity to address some of the biggest challenges surrounding these issues prior to their application.

Despite what this article has identified as a comprehensive change in public outreach and policy framing, the incorporation of biosecurity measures into biodiversity conservation remains speculative. Whether biosecurity concerns, and specifically One Health approaches and systems of biosurveillance, will emerge as a sustained and meaningful element of conservation practice as demanded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic remains an open question. However, given the sweeping changes these proposed strategies would entail, and their potential impacts, they warrant close examination.

Below is the link to the Supplementary Information.

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported through a fellowship from the Alfred Deakin Institute.

is an Associate Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. He is an environmental anthropologist and human geography whose research interests include human-forest interfaces, the social dimensions of agricultural production, and the politics of indigenous knowledge in both Australia and upland Southeast Asia.

1 The IUCN has produced a compilation of responses by multilateral organizations and high-profile political leaders and activists: https://www.iucn.org/news/protected-areas/202102/natures-future-our-future-world-speaks.

2 To a much smaller extent—prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—the wildlife trade was targeted by several projects seeking to monitor pathogens in animal commodity chains as part of a larger concern surrounding zoonotic diseases since the 1990s (e.g., the French-funded ZooCov and the longstanding monitoring of both humans and animals for Nipah virus in Thailand).

3 For example, the ‘One Planet, One Health, One Future’ conference held in 2020 was organized jointly by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Federal Foreign Office of the German government.

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Editorial essay: Covid-19 and protected and conserved areas

• Marc Hockings
• Nigel Dudley
• Wendy Elliott
• Mariana Napolitano Ferreira
• Kathy MacKinnon
• M. K. S. Pasha
• Adrian Phillips
• Sue Stolton
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• Trevor Sandwith
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• Candice M.D. Stevens
• Sebasian Troëng
• Sean Willmore
• Angela Yang
• zoonotic disease
• Coronavirus disease 2019
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Protected areas can boost biodiversity and local economies

by Duke University

Protected areas, like nature reserves, can conserve biodiversity without harming local economic growth, countering a common belief that conservation restricts development. A new study outlines what is needed for conservation to benefit both nature and people.

Conservation zones aim to preserve biodiversity, protect endangered species , and maintain natural habitats . "There's long been uncertainty about the economic tradeoffs," said Binbin Li, associate professor of environmental science at Duke Kunshan University, and lead author of the study published on June 20 in Current Biology. "Our findings show achieving both aims is more common than we previously expected. But that balance depends on socioeconomic conditions near a protected area," said Li.

The study found that 91% of the nearly 10,000 protected areas studied lost no or less natural land than similar but unprotected areas—a conservation win. But perhaps surprisingly, almost half the surveyed protected areas safeguard natural land without hurting, and sometimes helping, local economic growth.

Several factors were key to their success, the researchers say. For one, having nearby roads and a higher level of economic development both help. There are trade-offs, otherwise: the local economy is hurt, or protected areas fail. Biodiverse regions with emerging economies, like the Amazon and Southeast Asia, face the biggest challenges meeting the needs of nature and people.

"Conservation does not happen in a silo," said co-author Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Distinguished Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, and an expert on habitat loss and species extinction. "We must consider local development alongside biodiversity conservation to know where and how to protect areas to benefit both the environment and humans."

In the study, 60% of the communities living around protected areas had similar or higher levels of economic growth than those living around unprotected areas. Protected areas that both safeguard nature while benefiting local development tend to be smaller in size, and closer to markets and cities. "Bigger isn't necessarily better," said Li.

"We need to get to a win-win outcome more often, especially in the most biodiverse regions that can ill-afford losing out on economic development or biodiversity," said Li. "We cannot address biodiversity loss without addressing local development issues."

Journal information: Current Biology

Provided by Duke University

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Land use policy frameworks in canada and aotearoa new zealand: examining the opportunities and barriers of indigenous-led conservation and protected areas.

1. Introduction

2. materials and methods, 3. contextualizing indigenous-led conservation in canada and bc, 3.1. the rise of indigenous-led conservation in canada, 3.2. land jurisdiction conflicts, 4. results: policy frameworks for indigenous-led conservation in canada and aotearoa new zealand, 4.1. canadian reconciliation and conservation commitments, 4.2. canadian protected area networks, 4.3. legal personality status in aotearoa new zealand, 5. discussion: examining opportunities and constraints to indigenous-led conservation in canada, 5.1. reconciliation policies, 5.2. international commitments and federal support for ipcas, 5.3. protected area networks, 5.4. land jurisdiction, 5.5. learning from aotearoa new zealand and considerations for the development of ipca legislation in canada, 6. conclusions, author contributions, data availability statement, acknowledgments, conflicts of interest.

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• Migratory Birds Convention Act , SC 1994, c. 22.
• Migratory Bird Sanctuary Regulations , CRC, c. 1036.
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Vandermale, E.A.; Bogetti, J.; Mason, C.W. Land Use Policy Frameworks in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand: Examining the Opportunities and Barriers of Indigenous-Led Conservation and Protected Areas. Land 2024 , 13 , 886. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13060886

Vandermale EA, Bogetti J, Mason CW. Land Use Policy Frameworks in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand: Examining the Opportunities and Barriers of Indigenous-Led Conservation and Protected Areas. Land . 2024; 13(6):886. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13060886

Vandermale, Emalee A., Jordyn Bogetti, and Courtney W. Mason. 2024. "Land Use Policy Frameworks in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand: Examining the Opportunities and Barriers of Indigenous-Led Conservation and Protected Areas" Land 13, no. 6: 886. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13060886

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