Protected area management

Coral reefs are at risk from many threats including global warming causing coral bleaching, over fishing or destructive fishing, pollution by sediments, nutrients and toxic chemicals, coral mining and shoreline development and unregulated tourism. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are an important tool for marine conservation and management. This book provides practical advice on how to design and implement ecological and socio-economic monitoring programmes aimed at addressing these issues.

A Management Plan is a document which sets out the management approach and goals, together with a framework for decision making, to apply in a specific protected area over a given period of time. Critical to the plan is the widest possible consultation with stakeholders and the development of objectives that can be agreed and adhered to by all who have an interest in the use and ongoing survival of the area concerned.

As part of the preparations for the Vth World Parks Congress, a high-level team was assembled by IUCN to consider the long-term future of protected areas. They prepared three scenarios, plausible futures, rather than predictions: The Triple Bottom Line, where economic growth, social well-being and environmental sustainability were given equal treatment; the Rainbow, a world where globalization was replaced by regional alliances; and But Your Eden, where economics ruled.

The IUCN system for classifying protected areas distinguishes six management categories (I-VI). This publication aims to further clarify how they can be interpreted within Europe, in order to help protected areas managers and others concerned with protected areas to apply the IUCN system more consistently to ensure reliable categorisation and data gathering.

Protected Landscapes (IUCN Protected Area Category V) are lived-in working landscapes. In the past, there has been a tendency to see them as a rather Eurocentric approach to protected areas but increasingly the category is being designated in other parts of the world, including in a number of developing countries. The Guidelines include sections on the background and on the planning of such areas, and chapters on the principles, policies, process and the means for their management.