Directories

In 1994, IUCN launched Parks for life: Action for Protected Areas in Europe - a plan devised by IUCN with 200 partners to ensure an adequate, effective and well-managed network of protected areas in Europe. In November 1997, some 150 protected area experts from 34 countries met to review progress and chart a course for future work.

A directory covering the central American region and six countries : Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. For each country, a general description of the state of the environment is followed by a list of citations with abstracts of key environmental assessments and plans and a list of contacts in international, regional and national organisations.

This new edition reveals a global network of over 30,000 protected areas designated under national legislation which covers 13.2 million square kilometres of land, freshwater and sea, an area larger than Canada, and accounts for nearly 8 per cent of the world's land area, as well as 1.5 million square kilometres of sea.