Search

Mountains are remarkable storehouses of global biodiversity that provide a broad range of ecosystem services underpinning billions of livelihoods. The world's network of protected areas includes many iconic mountain landscapes. However, only ca. 19% of mountain areas globally are protected (excluding Antarctica); many mountain areas are inadequately (<30% of their total terrestrial area) or completely unprotected. To support the UN Convention on Biological Diversity's Global Biodiversity Framework goal of protecting at least 30% of the world's lands by 2030, we have developed a strategic decision-support tool for identifying and prioritizing which candidate mountain areas most urgently require protection. To test its efficacy, we applied the tool to the Western Himalaya Case Study Area (WHCSA). The six-step algorithm harnesses multiple datasets including mountain Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), World Terrestrial Ecosystems, Biodiversity Hotspots, and Red List species and ecosystems. It also makes use of other key attributes including opportunities for disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, developing mountain tourism, maintaining elevational gradients and natural ecological corridors, and conserving flagship species. This method resulted in nine categories of potential action—four categories for follow-up action (ranked by order of importance and priority), and five categories requiring no further immediate action (either because countries are inadequately equipped to respond to protection deficits or because their KBAs are deemed adequately protected). An area-based analysis of the WHCSA identified 33 mountain KBAs regarded as inadequately protected, which included 29 inadequately protected World Mountain Ecosystems. All 33 inadequately protected KBAs in the WHCSA are Category A1: first-priority mountain KBAs (located in the Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspot in developing countries), requiring the most urgent attention for protection and conservation. Priorities for action can be fine-filtered by regional teams with sufficient local knowledge and country-specific values to finalize lists of priority mountain areas for protection. This rapid assessment tool ensures a repeatable, unbiased, and scientifically credible method for allocating resources and priorities to safeguard the world's most biodiverse mountain areas facing myriad threats in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau plays an essential role in national to regional ecological security, biodiversity conservation, and sustaining livelihood. An array of natural resource management, environmental conservation, and ecological restoration projects have been trialed and implemented in recent years in the vast Sanjiangyuan region of the central Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, aiming especially to ensure socio-ecologically appropriate and sustainable development of animal husbandry in the alpine grasslands. Novel approaches in China have included the introduction of more collaborative approaches in protected area management and the development and formal establishment of a new multi-purpose national park system. Many milestones have been achieved. However, such developments are driven largely by national and global goals and very little has been heard to date directly from the people most affected: those residing within the protected landscapes, i.e. the community stakeholders themselves. This empirical, perceptions-based study aims to partially fill this gap, drawing on the results of focus group discussions with community representatives supplemented by key informant interviews and a targeted review of the literature, to provide synthesized feedback and priority recommendations for improving "community co-management" collaborations for the joint benefit of Tibetan herders and protected areas. The mixed-method approach employed in this study was based on a conceptual model derived from Elinor Ostrom's social–ecological systems framework, calibrated to local residents' self-assessments of their household well-being. Results highlight how the most recent configuration of China's national park model (i.e., its form and the approaches it utilizes) is generally deemed successful by community stakeholders, albeit with some notable perceived limitations mainly relating to a sense of lack of fairness and inclusiveness in the "one household, one post" co-management mechanism. The paper closes with discussion and recommendations around fundamental issues of equity, empowerment, and gender, finally pointing to the significance and, ultimately, the need to move even beyond co-management per se and to adopt a model of inclusive governance for conservation wherein joint deliberations and decision-making amongst diverse stakeholders are prioritized over the simple implementation of externally developed programs and management plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imperative of project sustainability has become explicit policy within development. This is especially true for technology transfer: 'development objects' are to be used by prospective beneficiaries long after the project's closure. We argue that the link between project sustainability, technology and 'success' requires deeper scrutiny. We investigate a community-based project in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, which included the transfer of smartphones, weather stations and camera traps. Upon the project's closure, we compare the stakeholders' viewpoints regarding the future use of the equipment, showing how technological objects attract new actors into the project's network, change its course and enhance its impact. We use actor-network theory to explain how development objects shape development processes by generating own networks and transforming social relations of power. We propose a dynamic view of sustainability as: (i) continuation of delivery of project's goods and services, (ii) durability of the achieved changes and (iii) feasibility of independent growth.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a review of current mainstream paradigms of nature conservation, the essence of transformations necessary for effective and lasting change are presented—namely, convivial solutions (or 'living with others'), in which relationality and an appreciation of our interdependencies are central, in contrast to life-diminishing models of individualism and materialism/secularism. We offer several areas for improvement centred on regenerative solutions, moving beyond conventional environmental protection or biophysical restoration and focusing instead on critical multidimensional relationships—amongst people and between people and the rest of nature. We focus, in particular, on the potential of people's values and worldviews to inform morality (guiding principles and/or beliefs about right and wrong) and ethics (societal rules defining acceptable behaviour), which alone can nurture the just transformations needed for nature conservation and sustainability at all scales. Finally, we systematize the potential of regenerative solutions against a backdrop of relational approaches in sustainability sciences. In so doing, we contribute to current endeavours of the conservation community for more inclusive conservation, expanding beyond economic valuations of nature and protected areas to include more holistic models of governance that are premised on relationally-oriented value systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the conservation effects attributable to changes in the size of community-governed protected areas (PAs) by adopting a generalized difference-in-difference (DID) design with a two-way fixed effect regression model and synthetic control methods. Panel data from the extraordinary datasets of the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPAs) and the Red List of International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are used for 32 Sub-Saharan African countries in this study. Our generalized DID estimates show that countries with community-governed PAs have reduced the IUCN Red List threat level by 17% for mammals. We also find stronger evidence of the effect of community-governed PAs on the IUCN threat level using synthetic control method that allows us to match the "intervention countries" with those countries that exhibit similar pre-intervention threat level. Our results are robust on alternate specifications in which we exploit variations in the cumulative size of the designated PAs differentiated by the IUCN governance types. We also compare the effect of strictly state-governed PAs with community-governed PAs. Our findings provide evidence in support of recent qualitative studies that find positive responses of community participation towards common goods that carry potential economic incentives. This paper contributes to the idea that inclusive environmental policies and legislations yield environmental gains not at the cost of social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]