Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 9.1 Conservation Tools to Protect Biodiversity
National Parks and Preserves
—The intended goal is to protect species, large areas
of scenic, natural beauty, and natural processes in as undisturbed a state as pos-
sible for scientific, educational, or recreational use. Park use and policy is regulat-
ed at the national level.
Indigenous Reserves or Biosphere Reserves
—recognize the land tenure rights of
indigenous peoples. It provides the opportunity to maintain their traditional sub-
sistence livelihoods on the land. Such reserves represent samples of landscapes
from long-established land use patterns.
Extraction Reserves
—allow local economies to develop through local commercial
enterprises (e.g., rubber tapping, rearing Brazil nuts, etc.). Such reserves allow
people to continue with their traditional economic way of life. This can lead to local
sustainable economic development. The success of such programs rests on
national government guarantees that land conversion to other enterprises (e.g.,
farming, ranching) will not take place.
precluded and enforced by park wardens.Therefore, people who have his-
torically resided within the hot spot areas would be displaced and forced
to live with others in a common land matrix outside the park boundaries.
Such a strategy is one way to reconcile the conflicting needs of conserva-
tion and economic development simultaneously on the land base. Both ac-
tivities are permitted, just in different locations.
But, most hotspots lie within the heart of developing countries with ex-
tensive poverty. Human population density in hotspot areas is on average
seventy-three persons per square kilometer, a number that is 73 percent
higher than the world average of forty-two persons per square kilometer.
Thus, displacing indigenous peoples from the hotspot areas and concentrat-
ing them with others in urban areas could increases the potential for huge
conflicts because such a conservation strategy can pit conservation inter-
ests against human livelihoods (Schwartzman et al. 2000). Indeed, concen-
trating people in the land matrix between the parks can lead to serious
overexploitation of resources. Once resources are exhausted, displaced peo-
ple look to remaining vestiges of resources.These remaining resources often
lie within parks. For example, on-the-ground monitoring (Curran et al.
2004) has shown that within sixteen years (1985 to 2001), Kalimantan's
pro-
