Evaluating environmental and social impacts of protected areas in South America

Abstract

In light of the persisting conservation pressures despite considerable conservation efforts, there have been increasing calls for rigorous approaches to evaluate conservation impacts to ensure that conservation efforts have their intended impacts. While government-controlled protected areas (PAs) have been the main conservation strategy globally, relatively little is still known about the performance of PAs under different governance regimes and the factors influencing their impacts. We therefore reviewed the recent literature concerning the social and environmental impacts of different PAs across South America and the methods used to evaluate them. In addition, we evaluated the performance of PAs under different governance regimes in reducing the pressure of deforestation and forest degradation in the Peruvian Amazon. We integrated data derived from remote sensing, GIS datasets, and interviews to better understand: (1) whether government-controlled PAs, Indigenous Territories and Conservation Concessions (CCs) helped to reduce deforestation and forest degradation between 2006-2011 in the Peruvian Amazon, using a counterfactual approach; and (2) the factors influencing the impacts of government PAs and CCs. CCs are a novel conservation tool promoted in various countries, including Peru. They comprise public land given to non-state actors for conservation purposes. The study highlights that compared to matched unprotected land, PAs under different governance regimes reduced the likelihood of deforestation and forest degradation between 2006 and 2011. While Indigenous Territories and CCs were more effective in this respect than government-controlled PAs, several institutional, social and political challenges have constrained the conservation impacts of CCs. This corroborates findings found in other South American countries. The study further highlights some of the key advantages and limitations of using counterfactual matching approaches to assess the social and environmental impacts of conservation interventions.