Out of the box: Protect the Unprotected
Aishwarya Maheshwari
Department of Wildlife Sciences, College of Forestry, Banda University
of Agriculture and Technology, Banda-210001, Uttar Pradesh, India
(ORCID: 0000-0002-6338-4254).
aishwaryamaheshwari@icloud.com
A species’ ecological significance remains same whether it is found
inside or outside a protected area (PA) then why the PAs are obligatory
guarantor to maintain the biodiversity within their boundaries (Gasconet al. 2015)? Despite an increase in the number of PAs,
connectivity is generally poor between and amongst the PAs, over 60% of
PAs are too small to support major ecologically important and migratory
species and eventually biodiversity is falling across the board (Coadet al. 2019). The PA approach, which was developed in the
20th century has been widely recognised as one of the
most important strategies for achieving conservation goals (Shafer
2015). However, in the 21st century, it appears that
PA based conservation approach has almost reached its practical and
political limits (Coad et al. 2019; Shafer 2015) . Over the
previous 1.5 century, the role of PAs was explored and expanded and both
success and failures have been spectacular(Shafer 2015; Kalamandeen &
Gillson 2007; Butchart et al. 2010; Watson et al. 2014).
Most of the PAs were established for the primary goal of conservation
and later sustainable growth have now stretched to contribute towards
livelihood, poverty reduction and national development (Shafer 2015).
Over 202,000 PAs worldwide, cover almost 15% of planet’s surface under
some practice of protection (Terraube et al. 2020). Moreover,
substantial wildlife exists outside the PAs, where exact estimates are
not available due to insufficient monitoring efforts (Cox & Underwood
2011; McCleery et al. 2020).
Ensuring better management and coverage of the PAs, the United Nations
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) set ambitious global
biodiversity targets CBD-2010 and Aichi targets-2011 but financial
support has been particularly inadequate to meet these targets (Butchartet al. 2010). The present COVID-19 crisis might disrupts fewer
resources for biodiversity conservation, as much support is allocated to
stabilize the pandemic (Gilbert 2010). Given the nature of the COVID-19
is zoonotic, it may motivate efforts to address limited usage of
wildlife from the unprotected areas and the relationship between drivers
of biodiversity loss and human health (Schulze et al. 2018). A
landscape protection approach should be considered through, for
instance, initiating actions to restore and develop unprotected areas
into more productive buffer zones as corridors, through landscape
restoration and conservation agriculture, farmland afforestation and
improving the connectivity of isolated PAs. Such landscape protection
approach has been practiced or suggested to conserve biodiversity beyond
the PAs in Asia (Clark et al. 2013; Kshettry et al. 2015;
Anon 2008), Africa (Wilson & Primack 2019), Mediterranean region (Cox
& Underwood 2011) but lacking at the larger global scale.
The future is likely to bring new challenges in biodiversity
conservation in the PAs (Schulze et al. 2018; Saura et al. 2019).
In such context, biodiversity conservation in the unprotected areas will
require unprecedented biodiversity‐friendly actions and co-existence
through integrated participatory approach, community based conservation
with strong participatory rural appraisals, enabling agropastoral
practices to meet biodiversity conservation and food security
challenges, as well as ways to move from lose-lose to win-win situation.