BOGOR, Indonesia—A fire rages, not only clearing large swathes of forest, but also threatening a protected area nearby. Managers are largely powerless to control the fires outside their site boundaries.
A new dam is constructed on a river, starving a downstream protected wetland of the sediment and nutrients it needs to survive, so that it is less able to contribute to local fisheries.
These cases exemplify a set of “hidden” threats that many conservationists face: events that occur outside the borders of their immediate control. Even when an individual site is protected and well managed, outside activities can have profound effects on its maintenance and permanence. External stressors such as forest fires, pollution, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and invasive species can have profound environmental impacts on a protected site.
A recent paper, led by the National University of Singapore and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), argues that project-level conservation activities must do more to contend with these types of external events. In particular, the authors highlight the importance of these external stressors on the design and functioning of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpted version of an article published to Landscapes.org. To read the rest of this article, click here.
We want you to share Forests News content, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This means you are free to redistribute our material for non-commercial purposes. All we ask is that you give Forests News appropriate credit and link to the original Forests News content, indicate if changes were made, and distribute your contributions under the same Creative Commons license. You must notify Forests News if you repost, reprint or reuse our materials by contacting forestsnews@cifor-icraf.org.