IABIN - Protected Areas Thematic Network

The Coordinating Institution for the Protected Areas Thematic Network is a Consortium leads by "UNEP-WCMC" (UK). The members of the consortium are:

• The Nature Conservancy - TNC (USA)
• Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt (Colombia) (Colombia)
• The World Conservation Union (Internacional)
• UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) (World Conservation Monitoring Center) (International)

Statistics from the report World Resources 2001-2002: People and Ecosystems indicate an overwhelming human dependence on rapidly deteriorating ecosystems, the systems that support all life on earth. One out of every six humans depends on fish for protein needs, yet 75 percent of the world's fisheries are over-fished or fished at their biological limit. Nearly forty-one of every 100 people live in water-stressed river basins. Some 350 million people are directly dependent on forests for their survival, yet global forest cover has declined by 46 percent since pre-agricultural times. Protected areas are critical to supporting these ecosystems. They support livelihoods, protect the supply of fresh water, harbor an untold wealth of genetic diversity, support a burgeoning industry in recreation and tourism, and enhance fisheries in surrounding waters. They also protect cultural monuments and sites of spiritual value to indigenous peoples and local cultures.

While total area protected in national parks and protected areas in Latin America and the Caribbean has increased at an impressive rate, there is still increased concern about the need to conserve the ability to move among patches of intact habitat. Recently, much emphasis has been placed on the need for ecological corridors - strips of intact habitats that connect larger habitat fragments and ecosystems, helping to maintain species movements necessary for reproduction and survival. One corridor project in process is the Yungas Andinas Biological Corridor that, once completed, would extend from Southern Bolivia to the Northern Tucman Province in Argentina. Perhaps the most ambitious corridor project is EcoAmericas, that is consolidating the core areas and buffer zones of the 36 World Heritage Sites and Biosphere Reserves located in the fifteen countries from Mexico to Argentina. Another biological corridor, the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor is being consolidated through the Central American Isthmus.

Protected areas offer the Earth's biota its "first line of defense" against encroaching human populations, play an essential role in the conservation of species and habitats, and are essential for our own survival. Protected areas are threatened by the impact of climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation by roads, rising sea levels, growing human populations, invasive alien species of plants and animals, and decentralization of political control. There are many other issues involved, including the disproportionate coverage of the existing "network" of protected areas biased toward mountainous areas (= rock and ice) and away from lowland forest and mid-latitude areas with soils appropriate for agriculture. Also, at the World Parks Congress (Durban, South Africa 2003) it was stressed the fact that few marine protected areas have been established.

Previous IABIN Council meetings have prioritized the need for a protected areas thematic network. Through improved access to data, the network would assist countries with overall protected areas system planning, analyze protected areas management functionality, and form a comprehensive information network where data on protected areas could be easily found and analyzed by Country, biological corridor, and ultimately as a Hemisphere.

Implementation
The IABIN Protected Areas Thematic Network will work with the national protected areas directorates of each participating Country and with a host of other potential partners, such as WCMC. For example, the Information Center for the Environment (ICE) at the University of California, Davis, is the developer and host of the Biological Inventories of the World's Protected Areas Databases. ICE works in cooperation with the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The goal of this collaboration will be to produce a publicly available protected area information system. This information system will include general site descriptions (with data on a location, date of establishment, area, and management history), as well as descriptions of human populations and uses of the area, an assessment of management effectiveness, and documented, taxonomically harmonized species inventories of plants and animals.

Existing work in the region includes a cooperative agreement between the Information Center for the Environment, the Smithsonian Institution's Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity (MAB) program, The Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) in Costa Rica, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. As a result of this collaboration, the ICE Biological Inventory Databases currently (as of 12/03) contain over 17,000 plant and over 2,400 animal records representing 32 Costa Rican protected areas. As part of this collaboration, INBio has provided in excess of 17,000 documented occurrence records from 30 protected areas in Costa Rica. The IABIN Protected Areas Thematic Network seeks to expand this kind of partnership to include the entire Hemisphere. At present, existing data are not standardized on either structure or content, so a major benefit from this thematic network will be the widespread availability data that may then contribute to a database which may be reliably queried, as well as to other hemispheric and global biodiversity initiatives.

A second activity will be to facilitate access to ranking systems that are used to assess protected area management effectiveness. For example existing systems include those of WWF and TNC (The Nature Conservancy). The overall objective is to analyze how effective is each Country's protected areas system and to analyze best practices and lessons learned. The scorecard when applied in a Hemispheric context would demonstrate Hemispheric effectiveness in managing biodiversity. Four indicators of management effectiveness of protected areas measured by professional judgment assessment include:
(1) basic on-site protection activities;
(2) long-term management capacity;
(3) long-term financing for basic site management; and
(4) a supportive local constituency for the site.